Abstract:

This essay responds to the question scholars frequently raise in relation to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), namely what is the purpose of this novel, which portrays the annihilation of the human race by a virus without providing any hope for the regeneration of humanity. This essay argues that even though Shelley’s work spends most of its narrative on the importance of productive labour, both in the pre-plague and the post-apocalypse years, non-productive labour constitutes the remainder that survives disaster. In the novel, Lionel Verney adopts labouring for labour’s sake after he realizes the inability of productive labour to regenerate the world. Similarly, useless labour appears in the novel’s introduction to have the ability to construct a radically new world. This essay concludes with a brief analysis of the role that non-productive labour can perform for the survival of the humanities, whose emphasis on tangible and marketable outcomes, in relation to research and teaching, has been limiting the world-making possibilities of the field.

摘要：

本文回应了学者们经常提出的关于玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley）的《最后的男人》（The Last Man）的问题（1826），即这本小说的目的是什么，它描绘了人类被病毒歼灭的事实，却没有为人类的复兴提供任何希望。本文认为，尽管雪莱的工作大部分时间都花在生产劳动的重要性上，无论是在瘟疫发生前还是后启示录时代，非生产劳动仍构成了幸存的灾难。在小说中，莱昂内尔·韦尔尼（Lionel Verney）在意识到生产劳动无法使世界再生之后，为劳动而采用劳动。同样，小说的导言中也出现了无用的劳动，它们有能力建设一个全新的世界。本文的结尾部分简要分析了非生产性劳动在人类生存中可以发挥的作用，其重点是有形和可销售的成果，