This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the "last man" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.
1 Introduction: The Last Men in Europe
2 The Character of Dystopia
The Language of Despair
Realist Dystopia
Setting and Character
Setting as Character
3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Dystopia
The Good Place
Anti-utopianism and Anti-utopias
Dystopian Narrative
Dystopian Law
Post-apocalypse
Future (Im)Perfect
Section II De-forming Character
4 The Last (Hu)Man(ist)
Humanism in Crisis
Utopian and Dystopian Humanism and Anti-humanism
Dystopianism, Naturalism, and Modernism
Defensive Forms: Humanism, Anti-humanism, and the Dystopian Novel
Dystopian Humanism
Dystopian Anti-humanism
5 Anti-Bildungsroman: Dystopia and the End of Character in Zamyatin, Burgess, and Ishiguro
The Novel of De-formation
Allegories of Progress
Divine Minus: Zamyatin’s Reverse Bildungsroman
The Predator’s Progress: Burgess’s Satiric Bildungsroman
Crimes Against Posthumanity: Ishiguro’s Bildungsroman Incarnate
6 Paranoid Plots: Dystopia and the Fantasy of Centrality in Dostoevsky and Orwell
Romantic Paranoia
Paranoid Poetics
"Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent"
Diseased Romanticism: Dostoevsky’s Psychological Dystopia
He Loved Big Brother: Orwell and the Fantasy of Persecution
Section III Dystopian Variations
7 American Anti-pastoral: Running Down a Dream in West and Mamet
Dystopian Design
What Happens to a Dream Deformed?
West’s World: Dystopian Picaresque in West’s A Cool Million
Utopian Plots: Dystopian Capitalism in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross
8 Romancing the Child: First Teens in Lowry’s The Giver and Butler’s Parable of the Sower
First Teens
New Worlds for Old Desires
A Family Affair: Romantic Humanism in Lowry’s The Giver
On the Road Again: Anti-romantic Anti-humanism in Butler’s Earthseed
9 Epilogue: The Dystopian Real
Biography
Aaron Rosenfeld holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University and is Associate Professor of English at Iona College, teaching classes in 20th-century literature.
