IM Public Lecture: Dr. Kevin Absillis

It is remarkable that all major early modern utopias – from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) and Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623) – explicitly pay tribute to the invention of the printing press. At least as remarkable is the fact that in 20th century dystopic fiction the destruction of books and the decline of the printing press are a crucial part of the nightmare they represent. One immediately thinks of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and, perhaps, of E.M. Forster’s short story ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909). This very motive is also taken up in a fair number of movies, e.g. Rollerball (1975, dir. N. Jewison), Minority Report (2002, dir. S. Spielberg), Equilibrium (2002, dir. K. Wimmer), V for Vendetta (2006, dir. J. McTeigh), The Book of Eli (2010, dir. Hughes Brothers). In my talk I will investigate this topical relationship between the printing press/books! and utopian fiction in order to assess a by no means purely ‘fictitious’ fear that our so-called Gutenberg Galaxy is currently coming to an end.