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This PhD submission comprises a novel of 60,000 words entitled The Recollector which is accompanied by a Reflective Commentary of 20,000 words that focuses on the theme of memory in dystopian fiction. The novel is narrated by Amos Blythe - a fortysomething male with a rare psychological condition that means he has almost total recall. As an epidemic emerges across the UK, with a high proportion of the working-age population presenting symptoms of memory dysfunction, Amos finds himself in direct conflict with those around him and a country that begins to focus on the present, rather than its past. The accompanying commentary reflects on the role of memory in dystopian fiction, in relation to my own creative practice and its critical and literary contexts. The opening chapter 'Imagine if you can ...' discusses elements of writerly craft involved in the production of a dystopian novel and includes a review of some of the key literature that helped shape not only my thinking but also the narrative of The Recollector. The next chapter, 'Genre Recall', traces the antecedents of the dystopian novel, and suggests that genre itself possesses a memory of its own, requiring the writer to engage in various 'recall' processes when they set out to create an original work in that genre. It critically appraises a range of primary and secondary material and contains a series of reflections on how this has shaped my understanding of working in a genre, with a particular focus on the importance and function of memory. The final chapter, 'Hideous Progeny', examines the use of science and technology by authors in the dystopian genre, again, with a focus on memory. I argue that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) qualifies as the first dystopian novel to contain a direct warning about the dangers of unchecked human 'progress' whilst being set in a world recognisable to readers at the time. I conclude that full engagement with the critical literature has informed some fundamental decisions I made on the creative side of the thesis but also helped refine my skills as both author and reflective practitioner.

In this thesis I have set out to perform two interlocking, although separable, tasks. The first is to provide some insight into the philosophical and theoretical roots of ethnomethodology by investigating the work of Garfinkel and others who have in some way assimilated, borrowed from, or been influenced by his work, in a context provided by a discussion of the work of Husserl and Schutz on the one hand and that of Wittgenstein on the other. I will show the ways in which Schutz has adapted Husserlian phenomenological insights to further his own fundamentally sociological ends and how Garfinkel, borrowing only selectively from Schutz and allowing many other influences to play upon his work (here Kaufman, Parsons and Gurwitsch are important sources of ideas), transforms ideas generated in the phenomenological tradition to an extent which suggests that his writings should be seen in a context set by Wittgenstein's writings (in terms particularly of notions such as 'form of life' and trulel in a sense of those terms which will become apparent), rather than encumbering it with too uuch phenomenological baggage I will move on from there to investigate the writings of other ethnomethodologists, showing how some - for example Cicourel - remain more firmly within the phenomenological tradition, whilst others have taken various of Garfinkel's ideas (although few have taken them whole and undiluted) and investigated, in their various ways, their implications for the study of -social order and society. In the process of this arm of the discussion I will point out some of the weaknesses and strengths of various ethnomethodological positions, suggesting in conclusion that there is important work being done and waiting to be done in the areas currently being investigated. The second task of the thesis is less historically oriented. Here the focus will be upon theoretical issues surrounding the problem of social order and the problem of meaning, problems which will be seen to be interrelated. The chief concern here will be to show the ways in which Wittgenstein and Garfinkel struggle to present and make coherent a sense of 'meaning' which is fundamentally different from that which is espoused by phenomenologists like Schutz and by many other contemporary sociologists, and how this difference rests side by side, in Garfinkel's work, with a radically different approach to the problem of social order from that which characterises the work of Parsons and others. The thrust of this difference lies in an attempt to reconceptualise 'meaning' in a way that does not posit as fundamental the distinction between 'subjectivity' on the one hand and an 'objective' world on the other, but which instead, by emphasising the omniprevalence of 'language games' and the 'indexicality' of expressions, focuses attention on some notion of 'form of life' or of the 'formal structures of practical actions'. The effect of this shift of emphasis, I will suggest, is that 'meaning' becomes transformed from seeming to be a 'thing' of some kind contained within a 'structure' of meanings to become instead an 'embedded' phenomenon, bound up with what we do in the social world, where the things we do generate and exhibit those orderly features which make meaning possible.