Abstract
The present study examines the aesthetic features of Sabry Musa's Lord of the Spinach Field (1987) through Karl-Heinz Bohrer's “Utopia of the Subject” to foreground Homo's quest for a wished-for yet unattainable reality. Post-Colonial Utopianism depicts man's inner turmoil to force an act of willful rethinking to enhance the “anticipatory consciousness” of a better life, a point interrogated within Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope to propose the concept of the “Not-Yet-Become”: the not realized futuristic reality. Therefore, the interest is in utopia/dystopia historicities as analytical markers of historical inquiry to analyze specific space/time coordinates; post-colonial pitfalls of a technoscience dystopia. As such, the remarkable characteristic of Post-Colonial Utopianism is critique, and “Subjective Utopia” strives to achieve a breach in the teleological ideology of historical structures; thereby, transformation is the central aesthetic strategy of post-colonial critique.
Highlights
Fiction is generally understood as the attempt to imagine unimaginable futures
The present study examines the aesthetic features of Lord of the Spinach Field through Karl-Heinz Bohrer’s “Utopia of the Subject” (Bohrer, 1994[1981]) to portray Homo’s quest for a wished-for yet unattainable reality
Dystopia has been associated with tragedies of 20th-century despotism
Summary
Fiction is generally understood as the attempt to imagine unimaginable futures. But its deepest subject may be our own historical present. (Jameson, 2005: 345). Technology, and futurity are strategic aspects of SF and the tenor of reason illuminates “the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced world” (James & Mendlesohn, 2003: 5) Within this cognitive reasoning, Yusuf al-Sharuni, in Science Fiction in Contemporary Arabic Literature (al-Sharuni, 2000), remarks that fantasy literature is effortless to interpret whereas SF requires mental and cognitive skills to create a rational narrative context (ibid.: 38). Yusuf al-Sharuni, in Science Fiction in Contemporary Arabic Literature (al-Sharuni, 2000), remarks that fantasy literature is effortless to interpret whereas SF requires mental and cognitive skills to create a rational narrative context (ibid.: 38) Within this rationale, Lord of the Spinach Field is relevant to discussing futuristic technology set in an unspecified world as a literary imaginative enterprise to exercise freedom of expression, to exhibit fears, hopes, and inner tensions allegorically in a post-colonial era. Homo’s journey to the past is an inspiring force to abolish static immobility and to defy orthodox determinism, which is advocated by the antagonistic capitalist society
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