On  Utopias/Dystopias

"Utopia is essentially in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what should be."

Theodor A. Adorno [1964] from “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernest Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing”, in Ernest Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. London and Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1988, 12.

How might we apply Adorno's notion of determinate negation to our topic of the possible relation(s) between Sf and religion?

Contrast the role of utopias in fiction with the role of Heaven/Paradise/Eden/The Promised Land/Valhalla in religions?

How could we discuss the role of the city in SF in relation to the idea of the Celestial City or Augustine's City of God?

SF and Religion  

 We could explore how SF addresses and adapts the following functions and roles of religion in society:

 1          Religion as an explanatory model

 2          Religion as a regulative system

 3          Religion as a set of institutions and practices

 4          Religion as a system of morality

 5          Religion as a vocation

 6          Religion as a form of power

1  Religion as an explanatory model  

1.1  Religious texts begin with accounts of how the world was created. In that sense, they combine the impulse to know and explain with the impulse to narrate. Has science replaced/displaced that function? How does this affect the treatment of the relation between science and religion in SF fiction? 

1.2  The development of science in the modern period has been accompanied by the reverse parallel of a decline in religious belief. How would you see the connection? How would you factor SF into this relation? 

1.3  Does Utopian/Dystopian fiction address the issue of explaining how the world is through showing how the world might become (dystopia) or how it ought to be (utopia)? What role does it assign religion in this?

2  Religion as a regulative system 

2.1  The fictional world in Zamyatin's We shows a society that has sublimated the religious impulse into an apotheosis of a regulated and regulative society.  

2.2  Religion can serve a regulative function in society, and as such, it can be substituted by any other set of regulative principles that invoke the ideas of order, coherence and systematicity, without necessarily addressing the issue of the "logic" or the "rationality" or even the "morality" of that order.                       

2.3  In We, can we think of a parodic inversion and distorted analogy between The Benefactor and God, Taylorism and Dogma, the Operation and Faith?

3 Religion as a set of institutions and practices  

 3 What parallels can we develop between the forms of religion (i.e. the tendency to formalize practice into rituals, such as prayers, liturgy, rites, ceremonies and observances) and the form-giving or form-creating aspects of SF as narrative?

4  Religion as a system of morality 

4.1  Religion promotes a morality through the nomination of good and evil, virtue and vice. In what way do we see this impulse at work not just in the SF text as fiction but in the novelist inventing that specific fiction in his or her time and place?              

4.2  How does the protagonist/villain of Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation “justify” his murders as a form of (inverted) morality? What larger point or attitude to the role of  ethics and morality in society would you ascribe to Kerr on the basis of this fictional character’s “justification” of violence and death? 

4.3  Contrast the notion of apocalyptic violence as creative/destructive energy in Miller’s and Kerr’s fictional worlds.

5  Religion as a vocation 

 5.1  In Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz the first section, devoted to Brother Francis Gerard, develops an elaborate evocation/representation of the life of a monastic order devoted to preserving —and in his case, embellishing—ancient (scientific) texts. How does this sustain an analogy with monastic life in the middle ages? 

5.2  How does Miller evoke a sense of the medieval monastic system of life? To what purpose?

5.3   What is the irony of Miller’s medievalism? Does it affect your sense of how he ends the novel? 

5.4  What are the specific ways in which Miller’s fictional world draws upon Roman Catholicism? Upon Latin?

6  Religion as a form of power 

6.1  Why do you suppose most religions treat God as omnipotent? What is the role of Manicheeism in this context? Do you find such elements in the SF texts for this course? 

6.2  How does the protagonist/villain of Philip Kerr’s A Philosophical Investigation “explain” taking on a God-like power over life and death? What do you make of that “explanation”?

 6.3What is the relation between religion and scientific/technological knowledge-building in Miller's fictional world?