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Satire and the "Inevitability Effect": The Structure of Utopian Fiction from "Looking Backward" to "Portlandia"
- Author(s):
- Eleanor Courtemanche (see profile)
- Date:
- 2015
- Subject(s):
- Nineteenth century, Comedy, Marxian school of sociology, Television
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- Marxism, Utopian fiction, Victorian literature, Television comedy, 19th century, Comedy arts, Marxist sociology
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6SZ0X
- Abstract:
- In the late nineteenth century the literary genre of utopia enjoyed a boom inspired by the success of Edward Bellamy’s 1888 Looking Backward, 2000–1887. These stories, including novels by William Morris and H. G. Wells, often featured a cicerone who explained how disordered nineteenth-century societies were transformed into superior future worlds. Because this utopian didacticism, inspired by Karl Marx, fell quickly out of fashion and was parodied ruthlessly by twentieth-century dystopias, it is hard to imagine how the form could be revived. However, the TV show Portlandia, which premiered in 2011, avoids the future-oriented “inevitability effect” of the fin de siècle utopias by returning to an earlier moment in the utopian genre: the satirizing of a society somewhere on Earth. Portlandia presents a lightly fictionalized version of Portland, Oregon, as a happy, inclusive, and prosperous town whose inhabitants are free to pursue their visions. Its “cringe comedy” satire of self-involvement complicates, but does not substantially undermine, its depiction of a peaceful alternative to the militarized American imagination of the early 2000s.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 6 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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