SOURCE: Barnouw, Dagmar. “Utopian Dissent: Canetti's Dramatic Fictions.” In Critical Essays on Elias Canetti, edited by David Darby, pp. 121-34. New York: G. K. Hall and Co., 2000.

In the following essay, Barnouw finds in Canetti's dramas a dystopian “dissent … from the utopias of the status quo.”

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In the twentieth century social imagination has been driven by dystopian rather than utopian energies, ostensibly because utopian possibility has receded before the “can do” of modern technology. Technocracy, however, has contributed not only to the increase of social and political problems but also to their solution. The real issue seems to be not so much the fact but the kind of creation, the various and ever-more rapid ways of change that, more than anything else, have lit up the age-old limitations of utopian models, their stasis and immutability. For the time being, utopian thought seems better served by the nonbinding reality...