ABSTRACT
Dystopias negotiate the social terrain of Utopia and Anti-Utopia in a less stable and more contentious fashion than many of their eutopian and anti-utopian counterparts. Although all dystopian texts offer a detailed presentation of the very worst of social alternatives, some affiliate with a Utopian tendency as they maintain a horizon of hope, while others only appear to be dystopian allies of Utopia as they retain an anti-utopian disposition that forecloses all transformative possibility, and yet others negotiate a more strategically ambiguous position somewhere along the antinomic continuum. To set up a critical framework for studying dystopian narrative, three clarifying moves need to be made to enable a better understanding of its textual and sociopolitical potential. These are: the categorical separation of Utopia as impulse or historical force; the formal differentiation of the dystopian from the anti-utopian text; and the political differentiation between dystopian texts that work from a position of utopian pessimism and those that are fully anti-utopian.
