ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the most recent fin-de-siècle as a moment in which, as theorized by Andreas Huyssen, cultural memory gravitated in two opposing directions: the impulse to memorialize history through museums and monuments and the tendency toward widespread cultural amnesia in the face of a rapidly evolving mediascape that seems to collapse past, present, and future into a synchronicity. Within this context, two notable dystopias, Lois Lowry’s classic children’s novel The Giver (1993) and M. T. Anderson’s young adult novel Feed (2002), warn of the dangers of amnesiac atemporality. In these texts, amnesia produces subjects oblivious to causality/consequences and devoid of affective depth. I read Lowry’s highly figurative depiction of how memory works in The Giver as a dramatization of Bloch’s concepts of recognition (anagnorisis) and the Not-Yet-Conscious, which demonstrates that historical memory can bring about resistance and social change. An analysis of Anderson’s critique of consumer capitalism focuses on how Feed finds the aesthetic conditions of postmodernity to be creating a loss of historical consciousness. While highly divergent in their plots, narrative modes, and utopian outlooks, Lowry and Anderson’s novels both situate memory in the form of historical consciousness—particularly memory formed through semi-conscious dream states—as perhaps the sole means by which dystopian finalities may be averted.
