ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the emergence of memory as a matter of modern historical concern and how those concerns manifest in utopian/dystopian literary narratives. Using a case study approach, the chapter begins with a discussion of More’s Utopia (1516) as the paradigmatic early narrative utopia where memory figures primarily through its absence. I then consider the historical determinants that, beginning prior to the French Revolution, made memory culturally fraught. Social transformations wrought by capitalism and commodity culture created a modern awareness of memory as both lost and menacingly present, a sense of historical and existential displacement that investment in the idea of the nation-state was meant to resolve. In the late nineteenth-century United States, however, unprecedented economic recessions shook belief in the American narrative of capitalist progress, and produced an outpouring of utopian alternative visions. This chapter examines the most influential of these, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), which argues that memory actually hinders utopian social evolution. Finally, the last case study of memory’s emergence as central to narrative utopias looks at George Orwell’s dystopian inversion of utopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In projecting the tendencies of modern totalitarian regimes as a warning of what the nation-state could become, Orwell questions the possibility of memory sustaining the utopian impulse under conditions where all forms of archival and collective memory are altered or destroyed.
