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The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction

The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction AnnikA GonnermAnn e C Th oncept of Post- Pessimism in 21 st Century Dystopian Fiction At the beginning of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama caused quite a sensation. Framing the history of the world as teleological process with liberal democracy as its climax in his e E Th nd of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama claimed to have iden- tified the universal denominator for civilisation: “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe.” (Fukuyama xiii) Diagnosing a growing global uniformity, Fukuyama declares democratic liberal capitalism to be the telos of human development (cf. Sagar). Although Fukuyama’s claims have by now been debunked prominently (many commentators have shown for instance, that capitalism and autocracies go equally well together), they still linger in the ideological memory of (most notably) leftist critics and movements, subconsciously accepted as unalterable truth about the cur rent political status quo. Scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have lamented the lack of imagination exhibited by the left, claiming that the (intellectual) left has long abandoned the ideological arena: the envisaged revolution by those who Žižek calls “left Fukuyamaists” aims at erecting a more human scao http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

The Concept of Post-Pessimism in 21st Century Dystopian Fiction

Gonnermann, Annika
The Comparatist , Volume 43 – Nov 15, 2019
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts
ISSN
1559-0887

Abstract

AnnikA GonnermAnn e C Th oncept of Post- Pessimism in 21 st Century Dystopian Fiction At the beginning of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama caused quite a sensation. Framing the history of the world as teleological process with liberal democracy as its climax in his e E Th nd of History and the Last Man (1992), Fukuyama claimed to have iden- tified the universal denominator for civilisation: “liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures around the globe.” (Fukuyama xiii) Diagnosing a growing global uniformity, Fukuyama declares democratic liberal capitalism to be the telos of human development (cf. Sagar). Although Fukuyama’s claims have by now been debunked prominently (many commentators have shown for instance, that capitalism and autocracies go equally well together), they still linger in the ideological memory of (most notably) leftist critics and movements, subconsciously accepted as unalterable truth about the cur rent political status quo. Scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek have lamented the lack of imagination exhibited by the left, claiming that the (intellectual) left has long abandoned the ideological arena: the envisaged revolution by those who Žižek calls “left Fukuyamaists” aims at erecting a more human scao

Journal

The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Nov 15, 2019

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