Past History in the Dark Future. Romantic Heterotopias and the Preservation of Memories within the Dystopian City
Past History in the Dark Future. Romantic Heterotopias and the Preservation of Memories within the Dystopian City

Summary/Abstract: The essay focuses on spatiality within negative utopias, more specifically on the manner in which authors of this type of writing have incorporated into their texts a sense of nostalgia for a better, often idealized pre-dystopian past. This nostalgia is textually embedded in the symbolic geography associated with certain heterotopian locations as well as connected with objects that function as temporal connectors between the dystopian present tense of the novel and the past. The issue is very important because historical memory itself often seems to be under attack in dystopian universes; therefore, such isolated environments act as singular bridges between the dire state of affairs of the present that is the object of the author’s critique and a better lost, longed-for past. The purpose of this essay is show how the critique many authors of negative utopias have made is rooted in the Romantic critique of the modern ethos. Authors of negative utopias seem to have inherited romanticism’s dislike of a mechanistic and rationalistic conception of space, the disenchantment of the world, authoritarianism as well as the nostalgia and longing for a different symbolic order situated in the past.

• Details
• Contents