Fahrenheit 666: Fundamentalist Firemen and Dystopic Nihilism

Drawing from some of our experiences of teaching a course in
Utopias/Dystopias this semester, John Wells and I intend to use Ray
Bradbury's classic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 as a point of departure
to explore the ways in which various cultural forces at work in the second
half of the 20th century--especially protestant fundamentalism--have helped
shape individual and communal desires in the American South.  Focusing on
fundamentalism's war on ideas, its efforts to discredit perspectivalism in
favor of moral absolutes, its strategy to recruit low-income foot soldiers
impatient with utopian social programs, we will argue that the
socio-political transformation taking place at the dawn of the Bush
restoration represents not just a war on intellectuals, but a kind of
goose-step movement toward "Truth" that both mimics and renounces the
strategies of the Enlightenment.  If the Enlightenment project employed
rational, dialogic inquiry to arrive at solutions for the vexing problems
of the day, contemporary social movements such as protestant fundamentalism
reject rational discourse while portraying intellectuals as the enemies of
an intuitively derived but universally acknowledged truth.  The result is
an uninformed, thoroughly propagandized citizenry; a President disdainful
of intellectual inquiry; and a U.S. Attorney General as sci-fi character, a
fundamentalist fireman who constructs Biblical imperatives to burn books.

Nota bene:  John Wells and I will be happy to limit our talk to one
20-minute time slot.  If needed, we could each produce a 20-minute paper
and use two time slots, but we're very willing (and perhaps more inclined)
to co-author and co-deliver one paper.

Andy Hazucha
Assistant Professor of English
Carson-Newman College
Jefferson City, TN  37760
ahazucha@cn.edu

John Wells
Assistant Professor of Political science
Carson-Newman College
Jefferson City, TN  37760
jwells@cn.edu