| Popis: |
The concept of utopia is not merely the idea of a good place, nor is it simply to be thought of as the no place of imagination. It is instead an ambiguous site of revolt, creating infinite change by challenging the status quo, and landing most frequently in dystopia. In utopia, then, is dystopia, separate but linked elements that revolve around each other in an endless dance of disillusion and inspiration. Utopia is not simply good, but contains within it the ambiguity of hope and despair because of this connection to dystopia. This thesis sets out first to understand these concepts, reviewing recent scholarship in the field of utopian studies and proposing a comprehensive definition with which to approach utopian literature. Establishing a definition of utopia that focuses on the function of utopian desire itself, it then explores Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia as an exemplary text in which to find not only the relationship between utopia and dystopia, but also the necessary ambiguity that so colors each. This exploration centers not on what the utopia of The Dispossessed looks like so much as it considers how the notion of utopia itself threatens the present by connecting it to the future, moving it out of inertia and into the momentum of constant revolution. What Le Guin's novel most importantly reveals through critical inquiry is not a template for social change, but a template for social questioning. This social questioning, in turn, reveals itself not as unique to Le Guin or The Dispossessed, but as a hallmark of speculative fiction which serves to mark the genre as the ideal locus of utopian literature. Defining speculative fiction reveals to be a difficult task, as its subgenres have historically been concerned with their distinctions, rather than their similarities. In their shared exploration of possibility, however, they emerge as more similar than not, united in their ability to express the desires so essential to utopia, either optimistically or not, upholding the concept of ambiguity as a whole. |
