By developing the concept of critical space, "After Utopia"
presents a new genealogy of twentieth-century American fiction.
Nicholas Spencer argues that the radical American fiction of Jack
London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Josephine Herbst
reimagines the spatial concerns of late nineteenth-century utopian
American texts. Instead of fully imagined utopian societies, such
fiction depicts localized utopian spaces that provide essential
support for the models of history on which these authors focus. In
the midcentury novels of Mary McCarthy and Paul Goodman and the
late twentieth-century fiction of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis,
Joan Didion, and Don DeLillo, narratives of social space become
decreasingly utopian and increasingly critical. The highly varied
"critical space" of such texts attains a position similar to that
enjoyed by representations of historical transformation in early
twentieth-century radical American fiction. "After Utopia" finds
that central aspects of postmodern American novels derive from the
overtly political narratives of London, Sinclair, Dos Passos, and
Herbst.
Spencer focuses on distinct moments in the rise of critical
space during the past century and relates them to the writing of
Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Henri
Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Paul Virilio. The
systematic and genealogical encounter between critical theory and
American fiction reveals close parallels between and original
analyses of these two areas of twentieth-century cultural
discourse.
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