ABSTRACT
The opaque and fragmentary nature Wedekind’s utopian project may not allow for much interpretive certainty, but it raises the question of the author’s role in the creation of his or her text. Wedekind’s claim that he forms the god of his fictional totalitarian theocracy in his own image raises the issue of authorial imagination, evoking the god-like power of the creative mind to call characters, situations, and whole worlds into being and destroy them again at will. This image of the author as demiurge owes much to the Romantic discourse of genius and the theory of the autonomous work of art. Subsequent aesthetic and cultural theories have sought to relativize this conception of creativity by pointing to the nexus of social structures and cultural practices within which the creative act is located; the individual text is reconceptualized as a meeting point for intertextual references, or as a document of its historical context. Yet a core of the ‘godlike author’ idea remains intact wherever artistic imagination and literary creation are interpreted as expressions of utopian desire. The discussion of utopia in literature and utopia as literature has often extended to include the idea of literature as utopia, the notion that literature itself has utopian qualities, regardless of its theme. The literary text, in this view, is not only a medium in which alternative worlds can be represented; it is itself an alternative world, a space set apart, and as such it contests the absolutism of reality. 1
