Groundless dominions: Utopia and empire from the fiction of America to American fiction.

摘要

Both liberal and Marxist discussions of the literary culture of Western utopia have tended to evade the question of its long indebtedness to the historical effects and ideological fantasies of imperial expansion. This dissertation attempts to provide a more dialectically informed, situationally specific, and critically defamiliarized understanding of the relation between utopian discourse and the production of imperialism's spatio-temporal cognates. It argues that this relation has been a mutually constitutive, if also complex and highly mediated, one: modern utopia has been informed by the West's immersion in imperial affairs just as imperial enterprises themselves have drawn much of their hegemonic power and popular appeal through recourse to utopian topoi.; The utopian investment in America and the American investment in utopia---fundamental for the formation of modern utopian discourse during the "Age of Discovery" and indispensable in the United States' own adoption of a transcendental and overarching notion of nationhood---constitute the "ground" of this work's larger theoretical concerns. Indeed, what cultural critic Mary Louise Pratt has called the utopian vision of "anticonquest"---an innocent, historically "exceptional" discourse of imperial power---has immense theoretical value for discursively grounding and demystifying the logic of U.S. imperialism's self-disavowing, consciously exceptional rhetoric. Deploying comparative analyses of literary utopias and non-fictional utopian "texts"---from Thomas More and Christopher Columbus to the imperialist utopias of turn-of-the-century expositions---the thesis provides a genealogical and dialectical reading of what it calls "groundless" empire, a vision of political power which insulates itself from existing geopolitical realities at the same time that it encodes what is anticipative and thus still "placeless" within the structural order of the present.