“A Bridge over ‘the Abyss of Negatives’? Reading Utopia Dialectically between Vertov and James”

11 Nov 2010 - 05:15 / 11 Nov 2010 - 19:00

basement of Victoria College

Ryan Culpepper will be presenting “A Bridge over ‘the Abyss of Negatives’? Reading Utopia Dialectically between Vertov and James” tomorrow (Thursday) at 5:15 in the basement of Victoria College. Lukasz Wodzynski will be responding, and there will be snacks!

This paper attempts to negotiate competing utopian discourses of the early 20th century by isolating and discussing two illustrative texts: Henry James’s short story “The Great Good Place” (one of the few explicitly utopian high-modernist texts), and Dziga Vertov’s silent film “The Man with a Movie Camera” (a touchstone text of the Left avant-garde). The paper’s goal is not to privilege one picture of utopia over another; rather, the paper identifies a shared core of desires animating both poles of this cultural and political opposition and argues for a re-opening of the early 20th-century period as a radically contingent moment in which, culturally speaking, shared utopian projects (American/Soviet, high culture/mass culture, male/female, petit-bourgeois/proletarian, etc.) were eminently possible, though not enacted for reasons of historical interest. The paper should be of interest to: scholars of literary modernism; political theorists; utopian-studies scholars; Freudian critics; cultural historians.