10.13125/2039-6597/5992
Recensione del libro di&nbsp;Valentina Romanzi American Nightmares. Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction.
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2039-6597
5992
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Mattia Petricola
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Between
Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares. Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
13
Reviews: Ed. C. Bertoni, C. Cao, C. Confalonieri, G. Iacoli
2023-12-08
2023-12-08
2023-11-30
2023-12-08
283-286
1
Mattia Petricola
2023/12/08
10.13125/2039-6597/5992
283
2039-6597
26
286
Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares. Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/5992/5759
13
             Valentina Romanzi
       American Nightmares. Dystopia in
       Twenty-First-Century US Fiction
  “Ralahine Utopian Studies”, Oxford, Peter Lang, 2022,
                        285 pp.
     Valentina Romanzi’s first monograph adapts her PhD thesis for
Peter Lang’s “Ralahine Utopian Studies”, one of the series that is most
actively shaping the field of utopian studies today. American
Nightmares focuses on the second pole of the eutopia/dystopia (or
positive/negative utopia) dichotomy in order to explore the
connections between contemporary US dystopian fiction and the major
cultural shifts taking place in the post 9/11 US. Romanzi’s arguments,
then, function both as studies of dystopias from the perspective of
sociology and as a «commentary on the status of American collective
identity» (2). From a theoretical standpoint, Romanzi is less interested
in unravelling the intricacies involved in defining dystopia as a genre
(she simply positions it within the domain of speculative fiction) than
in classifying dystopias according to a sociologically meaningful
taxonomy. This is why American Nightmares is structured around
Gregory Claeys’s classification of negative utopias according to three
categories: political, technological, and environmental dystopias.
Working across a variety of media, from literature to film through
videogames, Romanzi proposes four case studies that fit perfectly into
Claeys’s categories. Margaret Atwood’s 2019 The Testaments and Dave
Eggers’s 2013 The Circle are read as political dystopias through the lens
of surveillance studies; the 2018 video game Detroit: Become Human is
analysed as a technological dystopia with the help of the theories on
posthumanism; disaster and trauma studies are mobilized to


Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)
Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares (Mattia Petricola)



investigate the Hughes Brothers’ 2010 movie The Book of Eli as an
environmental dystopia.
      The general argument developed through the course of the
monograph aims at configuring these texts and media products as key
examples of what Tom Moylan calls critical dystopias. Contrary to the
“classic” dystopias of the 1930s-1950s, which were grounded in a
deeply pessimistic view of humanity’s future, critical dystopias
«embrace the belief that society can change, particularly if the
individuals that make it up react to a situation that does not fit their
needs» (15). Seen from such a perspective, this new kind of negative
utopias «seem paradoxically to be the last locus of hope» (99). It is, of
course, a type of hope «informed by reality» (113), which Romanzi
describes by borrowing the concepts of “authentic hope” and
“educated hope”, coined by Terry Eagleton and Ernst Bloch,
respectively. Contemporary critical dystopias assume then, in
Romanzi’s view, a role not too dissimilar from that of the «oracles of
the apocalypse» found in the Bible, tasked with «pointing out the evils
of their civilization and of retaining the forlorn hope that they will be
proven wrong» (112).
      By putting the methods for the study of fiction in dialogue with
the methods of sociology, Romanzi also reflects deeply on the
interconnections between these two fields. After providing an
overview of the narrative theories of dystopia in chapters 1-2 and
analyzing the decline of the “American Myth” in chapter 3, chapter 4
draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s and Riccardo Mazzeo’s In Praise of
Literature (2016), among other works, to demonstrate that dystopias
represent a key site for the exploration of the “sociological
imagination” of a given culture. On the other hand, the methods of
sociologists can (and should) be of great interest to literary scholars, as
they have the potential to add a whole other layer to their hermeneutic
practices. Which is exactly what Romanzi proceeds to demonstrate in
chapters 5 to 7.
      Atwood’s The Testaments and Eggers’s The Circle are read
contrastively as portraying two opposite interpretations of a
panopticon-like surveillance apparatus. While in Atwood’s novel a


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                                Between, vol. XIII, n. 26 (novembre/November 2023)



state of near-total surveillance is achieved through direct observation
and the disciplining of the female body, Eggers’s work offers «[a]
thinly veiled compendium of everything that could go wrong with
information technology» (161) when it is put to the service of what
Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”. The two novels also
display a radically different approach to the genre of dystopic fiction
itself: whereas The Testaments can be read as a cautionary tale about
«how easy it would be for a theocratic regime to be established» (159)
in the US, The Circle provides a poignant investigation of the dark heart
of Big Data.
      Starting from Rosi Braidotti’s idea of the posthuman subject as
inherently relational and «constituted through contact among zoe-
forms» (188), Romanzi’s study of the videogame Detroit: Become Human
aims to show how such a media product enables its players to
experience what it means to be part of a posthuman apparatus. By
following the vicissitudes of several androids in a world where
humans hate artificial life forms, the videogame’s players are forced to
experience the storyworld from the perspective of the oppressed.
Depending on their reaction to such an experience, the players have
the possibility to develop the game’s plot in a number of directions.
This could lead to an even more severe enslavement of the androids, or
to a treaty with humans by recognizing the rights of androids, or to
many other scenarios. By analysing the interactions between the
videogame’s subject matter and its peculiar mechanics, Romanzi
argues that Detroit: Become Human has the potential to «[foster] a post-
anthropocentric turn» (204).
      The final chapter focuses on the neo-western, post-apocalyptic
film The Book of Eli by blending film studies with the branch of cultural
trauma studies developed by Jeffrey Alexander. Here Romanzi
explores one of her most fascinating ideas, that is, the role played in
post-apocalyptic scenarios by the “error of rebound”, «of resettling in
old patterns of social interaction that, given enough time, were the
cause of the apocalypse» (231). By portraying the (disastrous)
consequences of maintaining pre-apocalyptic social dynamics after the



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Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares (Mattia Petricola)



fall of the world, works like The Book of Eli strongly advocate for the
need to rethink our society before it is too late.
      In conclusion, American Nightmares represents not only a valuable
contribution to the field of utopian studies from the perspective of US
fiction, but also an admirable interdisciplinary endeavour that
demonstrates how sociology and the study of fiction can interact in
ways that go way beyond those codified by the sociology of fiction. In
an era in which dystopias seem to be everywhere, a book like this can
certainly help us to bring hope back into the heart of our worldviews.



                                    The author
Mattia Petricola

       Is the author of I mondi dell'Oltremondo. Dante e la Commedia dal
fantasy alla fan fiction (ETS, 2023). His research interests sit at the
crossroads of thanatology, fantastic fiction, and intermedial studies.

       Email: mattia.petricola@gmail.com



                                    The review
Date sent: 15/09/2023
Date accepted: 30/10/2023
Date published: 30/11/2023



                        How to quote this review
Petricola, Mattia, “Valentina Romanzi, American Nightmares. Dystopia in
Twenty-First-Century US Fiction”, Immagini e rappresentazioni del lavoro
tra letteratura e cultura visuale, Eds. V. Serra – R. Calzoni, Between,
XIII.26 (2023): 283-286, www.betweenjournal.it.


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