Graduation Semester and Year

2012

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Kenneth M Roemer

Abstract

In this thesis, I argue that a new, ambitious variety of literary utopia, which I call an ecosystem utopia, has developed over the past forty years, chiefly in science fiction and fantasy. My primary examples are Paul McAuley's The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. An ecosystem utopia portrays a dynamic network of societies in a text's fictional time and space. Like a traditional utopia, it explores the structure and functioning of individual utopias, and like the critical utopia, their flaws and ambiguities. Sociopolitically complex, it explores threads of influence, alliance, conflict, exploitation, and dominance within and between multiple societies. To analyze such a complex system, I have created a hybrid methodology, econet criticism, which blends ecology with a variant of Actor-Network Theory to analyze individual utopias and trace their interactions. This is an exploratory work, a first step toward developing a new way of conceiving and analyzing utopia.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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