ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 takes up dystopia’s use of paranoia as a literary structure that resurrects dying tropes of romantic subjectivity. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four deploy paranoia in response to fears that the future will have no use for the private, interior, agentic subject. Paranoia responds to fears of the interpellation of the private, organic self within modern state structures of surveillance and control by offering regression back to a narcissistic psychic state. The chapter shows how paranoia operates in, on, and through modern dystopian character.
