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- Title
Degenerate Utopias: Dystopian Revisions of Disneyland in Early Twenty-first-century Italian Fiction.
- Authors
Fulginiti, Valentina
- Abstract
In 1973, Louis Marin described Disneyland as a “degenerate utopia,” a concept that Darko Suvin reprises in his Defined by a Hollow (2010). Here I apply this notion to two short stories written by the Wu Ming collective, “Pantegane e sangue” [Rat Harvest, 2000] and “Canard à l’orange méchanique” [A Clockwork Duck à l’Orange, 2000], and to Paolo Zanotti’s novel Il testamento Disney [Disney’s Last Will and Testament], originally written in the early 2000s and published posthumously in 2013. Under the guise of a satirical but ultimately escapist divertissement, the authors represent the “degenerate utopia” of late capitalism, revealing the dystopian side of capitalism’s self-proclaimed eutopia. On the one hand, these works can be read in light of Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini’s category of “critical dystopia” for their self-reflective, radical, and open quality, as well as for their multiple genre crossovers. On the other hand, their critical gesture is best understood against the backdrop of Italy’s rising slipstream, which both Umberto Rossi and Luca Somigli identify as a fertile ground for reflecting on political and historical alternatives. Finally, I will demonstrate how, by reversing the capitalist fantasy of perfection into a horrific and inescapable pseudo-reality, Wu Ming and Zanotti implicitly engage with the problematic legacy of postmodernism, still a controversial topic of debate in today’s Italy.
- Subjects
UTOPIAS; ITALIAN fiction; MARIN, Louis; SUVIN, Darko Ronald, 1930-; POSTMODERNISM (Philosophy); DYSTOPIAS in literature; DISNEYLAND (Calif.)
- Publication
Science Fiction Studies, 2017, Vol 44, Issue 3, p455
- ISSN
0091-7729
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5621/sciefictstud.44.3.0455