The Order and the Other: Young Adult Dystopian Literature and Science Fiction by Joseph W. Campbell (review)

Joseph Campbell's The Order and the Other offers a thought-provoking and important distinction between dystopian literature and science fiction for young readers. This slim but ambitious monograph aims to unpack these two genres by showing how each has a specific utility for both readers and educators. By focusing on what he calls each genre's "use value"—that is, how a genre "does a particular kind of work on the reader" (43)—Campbell shows how science fiction is "directly concerned with the subject's encounter with the other," while dystopian literature "ask[s] [its] audience to be critically aware of their own ideological constructedness" (6). He deploys a "tool" metaphor—one must find the right tools to examine each genre, which in turn allows each genre to be a tool for doing particular ideological work. He also situates dystopian literature and science fiction for young readers in the context of those works for adults to assess how the use value of these genres is different for young readers. Doing so allows Campbell to participate in longstanding conversations around these genres and to draw on previous scholarship while also showing how children's and young adult texts diverge from previous stances on dystopian literature and science fiction. Campbell uses a framework of poststructuralist theory—drawing together seemingly disparate approaches from scholars such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Kenneth Burke—to analyze ideological constructions in dystopian literature and science fiction for young readers.

Indeed, Campbell's first chapter, "Interpellation, Identification, and the Boundary between Self and o/Other," is deeply theoretical. Because he is claiming that dystopian literature and science fiction "engage with power and the individual subject in very different ways" (7), he spends a great deal of time laying out theories of power and subjectivity. Campbell begins by working through Althusser's theories of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), the systems of power (or the "Order" of Campbell's title) into which subjects are inherently interpellated, and the Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA), the systems of authority that maintain order when a subject cannot be controlled by the ISA. Campbell moves from Althusser to Foucault, combining the two theorists' respective conceptions of power to show that "ISA/RSA pressures being metaphorized" (17) within dystopian literature allows readers to critique their own power and lack thereof in such repressive systems. Campbell's discussion of these two ideologies undergirds his approach to dystopian young adult literature, which he claims has a use value of showing how subjects interact with the systems that shape their world. To theorize his approach to science fiction, Campbell turns to Burke's rhetorical work on identity, explaining that "[r]hetorical moves create the rhetorical identifications to create an 'us'" which then subsequently creates a "them" and a hierarchy and a scapegoat (23). He brings in Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer, a "subject who is stripped of the protection afforded by his/her citizenship" (26), to show the way sci-fi positions the othered subject.

I've detailed these particular examples because they distill Campbell's approach to dystopian literature and science fiction, but the first chapter covers a wide array of poststructuralist thinkers. Indeed, the first two-thirds of the chapter are devoted to explaining numerous poststructuralist theories, and it's not until the last third that Campbell turns to their specific application to adolescent identity. In these final sections, Campbell more clearly explains how science fiction illustrates Darko Suvin's concept of cognitive estrangement and thus allows young readers to examine familiar issues of identity in new ways and how dystopian YA invites an awareness and critique of interpellation. Considering how long it takes Campbell to apply this information to young adult literature specifically, I think this chapter would have benefited from more interweaving of adolescence and examples from YA and children's literature within the densely theoretical segments. Moreover, while he uses Roberta Seelinger Trites's work...