The Science Fiction Research Cluster presents a roundtable
discussion of recent work on Scottish science fiction author Ken MacLeod’s
Fall Revolution series by and with the University of Florida’s
Phillip Wegner. This series, argues Wegner, “represents not
only one of the most interesting recent utopian visions, but also
an attempt to rethink the very nature of the political act and agency
within an emerging global reality.” Wegner explores issues of
narrative structure in conjunction with the Lukácsian Augenblick
and argues “that MacLeod’s fiction gives voice to the
kinds of political energies that we see expressed in the then emerging
counter-globalization movement and in the theoretical writings of
Zizek, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Badiou, among others.
Thus, utterly shattering any vision of rigid historical determinism
and opening up the historical closure posited by Fukuyama and others,
MacLeod’s utopia becomes that of the future as ‘permanent
revolution,’ one wherein we are once again endowed with the
power, and responsibility, to act as political subjects.”
Suggested Readings:
1. Slavoj Zizek's afterword in Georg Lukács' A
Defense of History and Class Consciousness. (Verso, 2001)
2. Ken McLeod The Sky Road (1999) [fourth book of
the Fall Revolution series] --- MacLeod indicates that this series
can be read in any order.
3. Tom
Nairn on Hardt and Negri's Multitude in the latest issue
of The London Review of Books 27, no. 9 (May 5, 2005)
WHO IS KEN MCLEOD?
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/Ken_MacLeod.htm
Phillip E. Wegner is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Florida, where he teaches twentieth-century literature, narrative
theory, critical theory, and cultural studies. He received his PhD
from the Literature Program at Duke University (1993), where he was
a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. Professor Wegner is the author
of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories
of Modernity (University of California Press, 2002). His most recent
or forthcoming essays include, “Spatial Criticism: Critical
Geography, Space, Place, and Textuality,” in Introducing Criticism
at the Twenty-First Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh University
Press, 2002); “Soldierboys for Peace: Cognitive Mapping, Space,
and Science Fiction as World Bank Literature,” in World Bank
Literature, ed. Amitava Kumar (University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
and “Where the Prospective Horizon is Omitted: Naturalism and
Dystopia in Fight Club and Ghost Dog,” in , eds. Tom Moylan
and Raffaella Baccolini (Routledge).
Please contact Leigh Fullmer for copies of the Zizek afterword (lfullmer@ucsc.edu).
Sponsored by the Science Fiction Research Cluster