Exploring the Utopian Impulse

Exploring the Utopian Impulse PDF Author: Michael J. Griffin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039109135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
A series of essays by an international and trans-disciplinary group of contributors which explores the nature and extent of the utopian impulse. Working across a range of historical periods and cultures, the book investigates key aspects of utopian theory, texts, and socio-political practices.

Exploring the Utopian Impulse

Exploring the Utopian Impulse PDF Author: Michael J. Griffin
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9783039109135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
A series of essays by an international and trans-disciplinary group of contributors which explores the nature and extent of the utopian impulse. Working across a range of historical periods and cultures, the book investigates key aspects of utopian theory, texts, and socio-political practices.

The Utopian Impulse in Latin America

The Utopian Impulse in Latin America PDF Author: K. Beauchesne
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230339611
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
An exploration of the concept of utopia in Latin America from the earliest accounts of the New World to current cultural production, the carefully selected essays in this volume represent the latest research on the topic by some of the most important Latin Americanists working in North American academia today.

Becoming Utopian

Becoming Utopian PDF Author: Tom Moylan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350133353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
A dream of a better world is a powerful human force that inspires activists, artists, and citizens alike. In this book Tom Moylan – one of the pioneering scholars of contemporary utopian studies – explores the utopian process in its individual and collective trajectory from dream to realization. Drawing on theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou and science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and China Miéville, Becoming Utopian develops its argument for sociopolitical action through studies that range from liberation theology, ecological activism, and radical pedagogy to the radical movements of 1968. Throughout, Moylan speaks to the urgent need to confront and transform the global environmental, economic, political and cultural crises of our time.

It's beautiful elsewhere and I am here

It's beautiful elsewhere and I am here PDF Author: Jake s Nadrich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art and technology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Utopian Impulse

The Utopian Impulse PDF Author: Carmelo C. Rafalà
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Utopias
Languages : it
Pages : 466

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Book Description
The utopian impulse has been behind some of the greatest human engineered catastrophes of the 20th century. The framework for constructing the utopian impulse has a foundation that goes back much further, to man's earliest beliefs in paradise. Belief in utopia reflects a need for utopia as there is a biological component to the utopian impulse. People have a natural need for order and an unwillingness to accept randomness. Under certain conditions, external forces beyond an individual's or a people's control, or which appear to be beyond control, will stimulate biological responses that increase vulnerability to utopian belief as well as inspire the actions necessary to bring about the existence of a utopia. This is the utopian impulse. In the works of Umberto Eco, both fiction and non-fiction, man's vulnerability to the cognitive processes that inspire utopian belief is a common theme. The reaction to social, economic, cultural, and political forces, which seem to have a mind of their own, increase a way of thinking that increases susceptibility to utopian impulses. Fear of the Other; belief in conspiracies; apophenia (seeing connections and patterns between otherwise random events); millenarianism; dietrologia (literally behindology); belief in unseen agents, whether human or divine, are all found within Eco's work. The very nature of human belief is explored in such a way as to bring into question not only belief itself but what is accepted as truth. The consequences of the utopian impulse are, as Eco illustrates, tragic. It is an attempt to impose an irrationally derived belief upon the natural world. This leads to a policy of the ends justifies the means. Eco, and history, show us that the means are the end.

Demand the Impossible

Demand the Impossible PDF Author: Tom Moylan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780416000122
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description


Becoming Utopian

Becoming Utopian PDF Author: Tom Moylan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781350133365
Category : Utopias
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
"A dream of a better world is a powerful human force that inspires political activists and science fiction writers alike. In this book Tom Moylan - one of the pioneering scholars of contemporary utopian studies - explores the theory, the practice and the urgency of the utopian impulse. From the theoretical writings of Frederic Jameson, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou to science fiction works by Kim Stanley Robinson and China Mieville, from Latin American liberation theology to ecological activism and the radical movements of 1968, Hunger and Hope explores the many manifestations of utopian thought. Along the way, Moylan reveals the ways in which humans can confront and transform the global environmental, economic, political and cultural crises that beset us today"--

Visions of Utopia

Visions of Utopia PDF Author: Edward Rothstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195144619
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
From the sex-free paradise of the Shakers to the worker's paradise of Marx, utopian ideas seem to have two things in common--they all are wonderfully plausible at the start and they all end up as disasters. Three leading cultural critics look at the history of utopian thinking, exploring why they fail and why they are still worth pursuing.

Political Uses of Utopia

Political Uses of Utopia PDF Author: S. D. Chrostowska
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544316
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Utopia has long been banished from political theory, framed as an impossible—and possibly dangerous—political ideal, a flawed social blueprint, or a thought experiment without any practical import. Even the "realistic utopias" of liberal theory strike many as wishful thinking. Can politics think utopia otherwise? Can utopian thinking contribute to the renewal of politics? In Political Uses of Utopia, an international cast of leading and emerging theorists agree that the uses of utopia for politics are multiple and nuanced and lie somewhere between—or, better yet, beyond—the mainstream caution against it and the conviction that another, better world ought to be possible. Representing a range of perspectives on the grand tradition of Western utopianism, which extends back half a millennium and perhaps as far as Plato, these essays are united in their interest in the relevance of utopianism to specific historical and contemporary political contexts. Featuring contributions from Miguel Abensour, Étienne Balibar, Raymond Geuss, and Jacques Rancière, among others, Political Uses of Utopia reopens the question of whether and how utopianism can inform political thinking and action today.

Utopian Effects, Dystopian Pleasures

Utopian Effects, Dystopian Pleasures PDF Author: Peter Fitting
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781788743532
Category : Science fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
This collection brings together for the first time Peter Fitting's writings about the utopian impulse as expressed in science fiction, fantasy, cinema, architecture, and cultural theory. These wide-ranging essays trace the constant reconsideration of the utopian project itself over the past four decades, from its mid-twentieth century period of decline to its revival in counter-cultural science fiction of the 1960s and '70s, its second decline with the «dystopian turn» in film, and the rise of feminist pessimism in the 1980s. These pages reveal what popular utopian, dystopian, and science-fiction narratives tell us about today's most pressing political issues, including gender equity, education reform, technological change, capitalist excess, state-sanctioned violence, and the challenges of effecting lasting political change. Through analyses of various popular genres and media, the author demonstrates how utopian visions written from particular political perspectives transcend narrowly partisan concerns to stoke our collective desire for another world and a more adequate human future, teaching us how to become the citizens and subjects that a utopian society demands.