Dialectical Utopias In Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies Of The Future

Fredric Jameson is one of the most important contemporary Western Marxist critics.His thinking on Utopia runs through his entire literary theories and critical discourse,and is intensively embodied in his work Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions(hereinafter referred to as Archaeologies of the Future).However,although scholars at home and abroad acknowledge the importance of Utopian thought in Jameson’s theory and critical discourse,most of the current studies only regard it as a footnote to Jameson’s other propositions.As for how to characterize Jameson’s Utopian view,whether it can effectively solve the problems brought by postmodernism,and whether it can respond to the questioning of anti-Utopianism have not yet been resolved.Therefore,this thesis takes Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future as the research object,adopts the method of synoptic reading and takes Jameson’s dialectical view in Valences of the Dialectic as the theoretical approach to describe,analyze and evaluate the kernel of Jameson’s Utopian view and the evolved Utopian forms based on that kernel,with the aim of making an overall characterization of Jameson’s Utopia.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction,main body and conclusion.The introduction part includes research background,literature review of Jameson at home and abroad,methodology,research questions and the organization of the thesis.The methodology part mainly focuses on the introduction of synoptic reading,and the extracted structural framework for examining Jameson’s Utopian view based on synoptic reading.The main body consists of three chapters.The first chapter focuses on Jameson’s interpretation of Thomas More’s Utopia,aiming to characterize the kernel of Jameson’s Utopian view.On the one hand,this chapter clearly proposes that More’s Utopia presented as a dialectical complex is the kernel of the Utopian tradition from Jameson’s perspective,and on the other,this chapter reveals the dual structure of this kernel characterized by dialectical complex,that is,the dialectical complex of Utopian science and Utopian ideology and the dialectical complex of Utopian genre and anti-Utopian genre.The second and third chapters focus on Jameson’s interpretation of contemporary science fiction with More’s Utopia as the approach,with the goal of defining the evolved Utopian forms based on the kernel of Jameson’s Utopian view.Specifically,the second chapter characterizes the first evolved form of Utopia,namely,the Utopia as a dialectical polyphony,by exploring Jameson’s interpretation of Ursula K.Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson’s science fiction.On this basis,this chapter further distinguishes that form into Le Guin’s Utopia characterized by world reduction and Robinson’s Utopia characterized by realism.The third chapter characterizes the second evolved form of Utopia,that is,the Utopia as a dialectical incapacity,by discussing Jameson’s interpretation of Brian Aldiss and Philip K.Dick’s science fiction.On this basis,this chapter further distinguishes that form into Aldiss’ s Utopia characterized by future history and Dick’s Utopia characterized by historical present.In conclusion,this thesis points out that Archaeologies of the Future is the concentrated expression of Jameson’s Utopian view.This Utopian view is characterized by dialectics in nature.Its kernel is based on More’s Utopia as a dialectical complex,and its evolved form is the Utopia presented as a dialectical neutralization,both of which represent the Utopian tradition in Jameson’s sense and its persistence at present.Through this dialectical Utopian view,Jameson effectively criticizes anti-Utopianism and the fading tendency of the sense of history in the deep sense of Western postmodern society.