ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the intersection of humanism and last man-ism, linking the last man to anxieties about modernity, masculinity, free will, and identity and showing how the embattled dystopian character responds to modernity with a fantasy of return. Following critics like Phillip Wegner, who shows dystopia’s roots in naturalism, and critics like Stephen Sicari and Elizabeth Kuhn, who explore modernism’s anti-humanist tendencies, the chapter connects “nostalgic humanism” to a set of formal behaviors that respond to a crisis of narration beginning in the late nineteenth century with naturalism and continuing into twentieth-century modernism. The chapter ends with an analysis of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story as an example of dystopian humanism, and Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as an example of dystopian anti-humanism.
