GENRE CHARACTERISTICS OF ECOLOGICAL UTOPIA

Abstract

The article focuses on the genre features of an ecological utopia identified on the basis of E. Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975) and Ecotopia Emerging (1981), K. S. Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990). In their novels the American writers represent the concepts of future societies that are ideal in terms of maintaining the balance between nature and mankind. It is proved that these books keep to such typological features of a classical utopia as a sociocentric world model, didactic pathos, the depiction of a perfect society which is set in a specific location and time, functions in strict accordance with «green» rules. At the same time the construction of ideal ecological state is carried out by referring to the mankind’s past experience, the criticism of the present and the assertion of technological optimism — in the novels the hope that ecological balance can be achieved by the consolidation of human efforts in using only renewable resources is expressed. This allows authors to focus on the dialectics of the real and the ideal, fact and fiction, the possible and the improbable.