Article

Name: Correlation between utopian and anti-utopian and the constitutive foundations of the genre form of a novel

Authors: Alexey A. Kazakov, Dmitry L. Bystrenkov

National Research Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russian Federation 1 Tomsk State Pedagogical University, Tomsk, Russian Federation

In the section Study of literature

Abstract:

Anti-utopia has always been in an indissoluble correlation with utopia in the life searches of a writer, in the very material of literary works, and in receptive history. This paper combines two components of György Lukács’s theory (the step that the scholar did not take himself but that was probably assumed by default). First, the subjective insecurity of the novel world implies that it is only in a utopian vein that one can search for meaningfulness and value security. Second, the novel is based on the equilibrium of the author’s and protagonist’s opposing aspirations. Combining these two components may conceptualize the novel as the equilibrium of utopian and anti-utopian. Complementing Lukacs’s concept with Hegel’s antithesis of the heroic and prosaic model of the world allows the architectonics of the novel (and utopian as its aspect) to be determined by the very semantic structure of human existence in modern reality. In other words, we live like novel heroes in a situation of value insecurity, as cogs of a prosaic world, with our existence irrelevant to the axiological structure of the world. Lukacs demonstrated how the insecurity and projectivity of the novel person generate the dynamical “novel equilibrium” of the contexts of hero and author, pathos and irony, pride and humility, imaginary and real. To conclude, the correlation between utopian and anti-utopian can be identified as a part of the architectonic collision.

Keywords: anti-utopian novel, theory of the novel, correlation of utopian and anti-utopian, D. Lukacs, novel equilibrium

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