Rethinking Deterritorialization: Utopian and Apocalyptic Space in Recent American Fiction
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The paper will focus on recent approaches to utopian narrative and its power to represent the utopian. Major shifts in utopian as well as apocalyptic thinking have been triggered by limited resources, global decentralization, and recent developments in literature, theory and media technologies; new representational strategies open up fresh views of the past and the future. What role does the utopian play in a context that has questioned its basic theoretical assumptions of time and space, subject and object? Conceived as process, productivity, energeia – as Jameson would, following Marin more than 20 years ago – utopian discourse seems averse to ‘utopia’ as a literary genre in the traditional sense. Based on the work of Thomas Pynchon, Marge Piercy, William Gibson and others, I will approach various reformulations of the utopian in recent American fiction, using the Deleuzian term ‘deterritorialization’ to refer to the nomadic transgression of textual, spatial and ontological boundaries.