April SCCA Writing, Literature & Culture Seminar-Geoff Boucher, 14 April, 11am

April SCCA Writing, Literature & Culture Seminar with Geoff Boucher

Hi Colleagues, 

Please note change to usual day and time for our April seminar with Geoff Boucher. 

When: Wednesday 14 April from 11.00 am to 12.00 noon. 

Where: Zoom (see invitation copied below). 

TITLE: The Fictional Universe of the Authoritarian Personality

PRESENTER: Dr Geoff Boucher, Associate Professor in Writing and Literature, SCCA, Deakin University 

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the literary expression of the political views and religious beliefs of perhaps the most influential figure in the American postwar neo-fascist movement, William Luther Pierce (aka Andrew MacDonald), whose novel, The Turner Diaries (1978), has been described figuratively as the “Bible of the racist right”. After describing the text, the paper locates The Turner Diaries in its literary lineage, both in terms of what influenced it and what it influenced, before looking at the way that religious belief emerges from the work as the solution to a central problem of fascist strategy. The paper then turns to Pierce’s Cosmotheism (2013), which was intended as the literal “Bible of the racist right,” in order to examine its fictional precedents, which stretch back into late nineteenth century Romantic Aryanism and Wotanism, before briefly reflecting on why the neo-fascist movement, which political expediency directs to alliance with fundamentalist Christianity, is consistently anti-Christian in its basic beliefs. Authoritarian personalities, such as William Pierce, inhabit a social world, indeed, a complete universe, which is structured like a fiction and, in fact, is often directly derived from fictions, and, this fiction is completely orthogonal to mainstream narratives (especially, religious and political ones)—so why does anybody follow them? In conclusion, the paper notices the menacing constellation of conspiracy and degeneracy invoked by fascist narratives and speculates about the role of anxiety in “unhinging” potential recruits, and aligning them—transiently or durably—with authoritarian attitudes. 

NOTE: This paper is a contribution to a research project that I am engaged in with Helen Young, Emmett Stinson and Andrew Dean. It picks up and amplifies some ideas that we are jointly working out.