Brave New World is definitely dystopian, not post-utopian. Nancy’s suggestion for post-utopian is exactly right. I definitely agree that we can meaningfully classify cultural production, though.
I think it’s both. “Brave New World” portrays a dystopia (Huxley called it a “negative utopia”) but it’s also post-utopian because it displays skepticism towards utopian ideals (Huxley wrote it in reaction to H. G. Wells’ “Men Like Gods”).
I don’t claim any expertise on this subject: in fact, I hadn’t heard of post-utopianism at all until I read the word in this article. It just seemed to me to be overstating the case to claim that a term like this is meaningless. Vague, certainly. Not very profound, yes. But meaningless, no.
The meaning is easily deducible: in the history of ideas “post-” is often used to mean “after; in consequence of; in reaction to” (and “utopian” is straightforward). I checked my understanding by searching Google Scholar and Books: there seems to be only one book on the subject (The post-utopian imagination: American culture in the long 1950s by M. Keith Booker) but from reading the preview it seems to be using the word in the way that I described above.
The fact that the literature on the subject is small makes post-utopianism an easier target for this kind of attack: few people are likely to be familiar with the idea, or motivated to defend it, and it’s harder to establish what the consensus on the subject is. By contrast, imagine trying to claim that “hard science fiction” was a meaningless term.
Brave New World is definitely dystopian, not post-utopian. Nancy’s suggestion for post-utopian is exactly right. I definitely agree that we can meaningfully classify cultural production, though.
I think it’s both. “Brave New World” portrays a dystopia (Huxley called it a “negative utopia”) but it’s also post-utopian because it displays skepticism towards utopian ideals (Huxley wrote it in reaction to H. G. Wells’ “Men Like Gods”).
I don’t claim any expertise on this subject: in fact, I hadn’t heard of post-utopianism at all until I read the word in this article. It just seemed to me to be overstating the case to claim that a term like this is meaningless. Vague, certainly. Not very profound, yes. But meaningless, no.
The meaning is easily deducible: in the history of ideas “post-” is often used to mean “after; in consequence of; in reaction to” (and “utopian” is straightforward). I checked my understanding by searching Google Scholar and Books: there seems to be only one book on the subject (The post-utopian imagination: American culture in the long 1950s by M. Keith Booker) but from reading the preview it seems to be using the word in the way that I described above.
The fact that the literature on the subject is small makes post-utopianism an easier target for this kind of attack: few people are likely to be familiar with the idea, or motivated to defend it, and it’s harder to establish what the consensus on the subject is. By contrast, imagine trying to claim that “hard science fiction” was a meaningless term.