This article argues that sociologists have much to gain from a fuller engagement with dystopian literature. This is because (i) the speculation in dystopian literature tends to be more grounded in empirical social reality than in the case of utopian literature, and (ii) the literary conventions of the dystopia more readily illustrate the relationship between the inner life of the individual and the greater whole of social-historical reality. These conventional features mean dystopian literature is especially attuned to how historically-conditioned social forces shape the inner life and personal experience of the individual, and how acts of individuals can, in turn, shape the social structures in which they are situated. In other words, dystopian literature is a potent exercise of what C. Wright Mills famously termed ‘the sociological imagination’.
This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre.
A series of terrorist attacks in France and the UK during 2015-17 has brought to public attention many of the same issues raised in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the US in 2001. In the process, long-running debates around the topic of the West's relationship to Islam have been given new impetus and numerous groups have reported an increase in anti-Islamic sentiment throughout Western Europe. In this fraught social and political context, the complex history of the West's interactions with Islam has tended to be displaced by a simplistic, neo-Orientalist narrative of a 'clash of civilisations'. This article focuses on Martin Amis's book "The Second Plane" as both a vivid early illustration of this tendency and as symptomatic of the various local, national, and geopolitical divisions which the myth of clashing civilisations serves to reinforce. Drawing on both William Connolly's work on tragedy and Edward Said's work on Orientalism, this article argues that what the example of Amis and 9/11 illustrates is the need for a sense of history in the debate over Islamism today.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.