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Quote by John D'Agata

“I'm not worried about what part of their life they needed to massage in order to achieve something that I get to experience as transcendent. Because that's the point of literature, I think: to connect.”

Quote by John D'Agata

Author

John D'Agata is an American essayist known for his distinctive writing style and profound insights into the reality of the world. His works often explore the edges and limits of human existence, as well as the boundaries between language and truth. more

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“Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.”

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Author:Christine Jennings

“The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.”

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Author:Christine Jennings

“If there's a poster boy for the fact that all essays are written through personae, it's Crèvecoeur.”

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Author:John D'Agata

“I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.”

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Author:Christine Jennings

“The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.”

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Author:Christine Jennings

“The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.”

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Author:Christine Jennings

“So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was like the 1950s. The American economy was pumping at top speed. The kinds of people who would move into these communities and organize their lives around a utopian dream now had dreams about the West.”

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“The thought was, 'We're going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no rocks, and there's gold in the hills.' The West becomes the surface onto which people project their fantasies, where once the future had been the place they projected their fantasies. So it's not just the war that ends the utopian communities, but what follows.”

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Author:Christine Jennings

“They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.”

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“don't think I should be in the business of making big pronouncements about where we are now, but I would say that dissatisfaction is as acute now as it was then. What's different, and what I think we can learn from these people, despite their abundant folly, is that we're not using the future as the organizing principle for our critique.”

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Author:Christine Jennings