Two Dreamers

Edward Sugden’s paper will examine two fictional sleepers: from 1817, Rip van Winkle, and from 1888, Julian West, the protagonist of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards. On going to sleep, Rip and West are subject... [ view full abstract ]

Edward Sugden’s paper will examine two fictional sleepers: from 1817, Rip van Winkle, and from 1888, Julian West, the protagonist of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards. On going to sleep, Rip and West are subject to the conditions of political modernity that emerged in the nineteenth century: nation, discipline, capital, rationalization, standardization. Yet while Rip cannot dream and merely returns, diminished, to a changed world, West is able to imagine an entire, fully functional alternative reality into being. So what changes across these seventy years? The nineteenth century is most often thought of as a century when these forces of political modernity directed their energies towards colonizing subjectivity. Yet the huge difference between the dreams of Rip and Julian tells another story. This difference suggests that while modern power aimed to colonize the mind, there emerged an imaginative counterforce that could produce alternative worlds not subject to its totalizing grasp. After spending time close reading these incidents of dream in “Rip van Winkle” and Looking Backwards with a view to establishing a changed historical metanarrative, Sugden will provide a framework for this unreal world, considering how it came into being, the states of consciousness that provided entry to it, the emergent genres that channeled it, and the minoritarian peoples for whom it was a resource.