Friday, January 9, 2009

A New Semester

Asked to blog about my "hopes and expectations" for RCID 813 Topias, I believe an answer requires two parts: first, some background about my encounters with sf and utopian literature; and second, how that literature might dovetail with my current research interests.

PART I: BACKGROUND

1950s-60s: Childhood

For as long as I can remember, a fascination with alternate worlds and imagined futures has been a mainspring of my reading habits. I still vividly remember the thrill (and pray I never get over it) of learning to read "all by myself" in first grade; of discovering the Doctor Doolittle series in third grade; of a reading enrichment class in sixth grade that introduced me to Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, Jules Verne, and Tolkien.

And during my preschool and elementary years of the late 1950s and then through the 1960s, the old sf serials such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Phantom Empire, plus the many sf movies of the 1950s, were staples on Saturday kids TV. In prime time (and later in syndicated reruns) I was enthusiastic viewer of Star Trek, Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Time Tunnel, and other sf classics.

1970s-80s: Teen and Young Adult

Through the 1970s as I progressed through junior high, senior high and college (where I was an English major), I may have read American and Brit Lit for school. But sf and fantasy was my daily choice for pleasure reading. And of course, I can remember standing in line at the theater with my girlfriend to watch the first runs of Stars Wars (1977) and Star Trek: The Movie (1977). Even through the 1980s as I married and raised a young family, every night at bedtime I relaxed with a book that was nearly always a sf or fantasy novel.

A bibliography of all the sf and fantasy I read during the years would be long indeed! But generally I stuck to works by respected authors that impressed me as being of high quality, ones that challenged me to think, rather than pulp. A good example is my all-time favorite sf series, Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and Robot Novels. Another example from the fantasy genre is Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy and its sequels, a real favorite of mine.

1990s: Time of Change

After 1990, however, my sf and fantasy reading began to decline, though it still formed a substantial portion of my daily pleasure reading until about mid-decade. Thus over the past dozen years or so I've read little in these genres (even though I have remained a loyal viewer of the various Star Trek spinoffs and love to watch classic sf movies and TV on cable).

Why did I stop reading sf and fantasy? Two factors:

> The first factor was November 9, 1989. If you didn't grow up during the Cold War then you don't realize what a paradigm shift that was for my generation. Suddenly I was living in an "alternate future" that was totally unexpected. To understand what was happening around me and this new world in which I lived, I felt driven to expand my knowledge of modern history. In time this drew me to my interest in Holocaust Studies.

> The second factor was the changing nature of sf and fantasy. What I enjoy best about sf and fantasy is, as described in the Moylan chapter (pp 50-53), the chance to enlist in the fictive culture and by stages figure out the absent paradigm. But after the mid-1980s when cyberpunk ruled, it seemed that sf became mocking and ironic with too much in-your-face philosophizing. And fantasy works seemed more and more derivative of Tolkien, except they competed for the most unpronounceable names of characters and lands.

2000s: Reflections

Yet I have always believed that my formative years spent in reading sf and fantasy were a wonderful boon for me. Not only did I spend many leisurely hours in the adventure of exploring imagined worlds, and not only did I read many great stories and much writing of high quality.

But I've always believed my immersion in sf and fantasy truly enlarged my ability to imagine and conceptualize and see a larger vision, an ability that has suffused and enriched every aspect of my life. And this passion for imaginative thinking I was able to share with my children and build into their lives, so that I'm now seeing its fruits in a new generation.

RCID 813 Topias is may very well be the last seminar that I take for credit in my academic career. So perhaps, in closing the circle, it's fitting that worlds of imagination should be our topic.

PART II: HOPES

Now that you've indulged my trip down memory lane, the question arises: How might a study of utopias/dystopias fit into my current research interests? Four thoughts comes to mind:

> Though I was an English major in the 1970s as an undergrad, later in life I got my MA in communication studies. So I find myself less drawn to literary criticism of utopian works and more attracted to the project suggested by Jameson of digging into the underlying culture which produced the utopian/dystopian vision.

It strikes me that the analyst could discern much about a culture by what it regards as idyllic or hellish. I find myself initially persuaded by the argument, encountered in our readings this week (see Fitting, pp 9-10), that utopian writers necessarily construct their imagined worlds out of materials provided by their extant cultures. And if one believes that readers co-construct the meaning of a text, then audiences are likewise working from their cultural assumptions.

Twenty-five years ago in my hometown of Washington DC, I attended a Smithsonian exhibit entitled Yesterday's Tomorrows and also bought the accompanying book. The exhibit depicted how the futures imagined by people in the past tell us most of all about the great concerns of their own times. What a fascinating read! (In a similar vein, I recommend Larsen's The Devil in the White City and Gelernter's The Lost World of the Fair about, respectively, and 1893 and 1939 world's fairs.)

For example, in 1895 Wells's The Time Machine offered a commentary on industrialization and class division in his dystopian future world of Eloi and Morlocks. The 1960 film version was a riff on nuclear holocaust, not class struggle. And the 2002 film version was merely a shallow showcase for big-budget special effects with a few obligatory nods to feminist and environmentalist sensibilities.

Anyway, I can see some possible applications for my own researches. Right now I'm doing a lot of reading for my dissertation on organizational communication, discourse, and culture. Perhaps the utopias forecast by the organizations I'm studying might help me unlock their underlying cultures.

> Utopias are a mainspring that drives much of modern history. Consider the French Revolution (1789) . . . or the classical positivism of Auguste Comte (1830) that has deeply influenced science . . . or the Soviet workers paradise . . . or the Nazi vision of a racial New Order.

My dissertation is on the technical and organizational communication of the Holocaust. One recent framework for interpreting Nazism (as well as other revolutionary movements) is the concept of the political religion. (See Burleigh's recent books, Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes.) In that vein, perhaps this course in Topias may give me a new interpretive tools to analyze utopian political movements.

> I also have a research interest in religious rhetorics, and in particular that of Christian fundamentalism. Last semester I presented a couple of conference papers on the subject and now have one journal article at the revise-and-resubmit stage and another under review. Again, I can see possibilities for analyzing fundamentalist cultures by studying their utopias.

> Finally, I still enjoy sf even if I read less of the genre than earlier in my life. And who knows? Maybe after graduation I will have more time, and perhaps more of a need, for pleasure reading outside my main research interests. So perhaps this course will give me new tools for revisiting favorite old stories, encountering new stories, and deriving insightful new meanings from both.

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