"not a place but a process": Dana Spiotta's Utopian Fictions

Abstract: Dana Spiotta's repeated use of upstate New York locations in her fiction has occasionally drawn on the history of nineteenth-century utopian communities that flourished in the area. Though the experiences Spiotta's characters have in these locations are far from utopian, the novels that emphasize such sites to a lesser degree ( Stone Arabia, Innocents and Others ) show greater faith in radical improvement, but only on the individual level. As several contemporary utopian theorists suggest, utopia is a process rather than a definable site. Thus it is finally only through mental process that Spiotta's characters can arrive, however briefly, at something like utopian transcendence.