Utopian Visions

Utopian Visions PDF Author:
Publisher: Time Life Medical
ISBN: 9780809463770
Category : Life on other planets
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Examines the history of the quest for the ideal life.

Utopian Visions

Utopian Visions PDF Author:
Publisher: Time Life Medical
ISBN: 9780809463770
Category : Life on other planets
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Examines the history of the quest for the ideal life.

Visions of the City

Visions of the City PDF Author: David Pinder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317972856
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Visions of the City is a dramatic history of utopian urbanism in the twentieth century. It explores radical demands for new spaces and ways of living, and considers their effects on planning, architecture and struggles to shape urban landscapes. The author critically examines influential utopian approaches to urbanism in western Europe associated with such figures as Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, uncovering the political interests, desires and anxieties that lay behind their ideal cities. He also investigates avant-garde perspectives from the time that challenged these conceptions of cities, especially from within surrealism. At the heart of this richly illustrated book is an encounter with the explosive ideas of the situationists. Tracing the subversive practices of this avant-garde group and its associates from their explorations of Paris during the 1950s to their alternative visions based on nomadic life and play, David Pinder convincingly explains the significance of their revolutionary attempts to transform urban spaces and everyday life. He addresses in particular Constant's New Babylon, finding within his proposals a still powerful provocation to imagine cities otherwise. The book not only recovers vital moments from past hopes and dreams of modern urbanism. It also contests current claims about the 'end of utopia', arguing that reconsidering earlier projects can play a critical role in developing utopian perspectives today. Through the study of utopian visions, it aims to rekindle elements of utopianism itself. A superb critical exploration of the underside of utopian thought over the last hundred years and its continuing relevance in the here and now for thinking about possible urban worlds. The treatment of the Situationists and their milieu is a revelation. David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, City University of New York Graduate School

Visions of Utopia

Visions of Utopia PDF Author: Edward Rothstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198033044
Category : History
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. In Visions of Utopia, three leading cultural critics--Edward Rothstein, Martin Marty, and Herbert Muschamp--look at the history of utopian thinking, exploring why they fail and why they are still worth pursuing. Edward Rothstein, New York Times cultural critic, contends that every utopia is really a dystopia--a disaster in the making--one that overlooks the nature of humanity and the impossibilities of paradise. He traces the ideal in politics and technology and suggests that only in art--and especially in music--does the desire for utopia find satisfaction. Martin Marty examines several models of utopia--from Thomas More's to a 1960s experimental city that he helped to plan--to show that, even though utopias can never be realized, we should not be too quick to condemn them. They can express dimensions of the human spirit that might otherwise be stifled and can plant ideas that may germinate in more realistic and practical soil. And Herbert Muschamp, the New York Times architectural critic, looks at Utopianism as exemplified in two different ways: the Buddhist tradition and the work of visionary Viennese architect Adolph Loos. Utopian thinking embodies humanity's noblest impulses, yet it can lead to horrors such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Regime. In Visions of Utopia, these leading thinkers offer an intriguing look at the paradoxes of paradise.

City of Virtues

City of Virtues PDF Author: Chuck Wooldridge
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805986
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Throughout Nanjing’s history, writers have claimed that its spectacular landscape of mountains and rivers imbued the city with “royal qi,” making it a place of great political significance. City of Virtues examines the ways a series of visionaries, drawing on past glories of the city, projected their ideologies onto Nanjing as they constructed buildings, performed rituals, and reworked the literary heritage of the city. More than an urban history of Nanjing from the late 18th century until 1911 — encompassing the Opium War, the Taiping occupation of the city, the rebuilding of the city by Zeng Guofan, and attempts to establish it as the capital of the Republic of China — this study shows how utopian visions of the cosmos shaped Nanjing’s path through the turbulent 19th century.

Utopian Visions and Revisions

Utopian Visions and Revisions PDF Author: Artur Blaim
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
ISBN: 9783631675656
Category : Dystopian fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The book employs the concepts of utopia, dystopia, and anti-utopia in the analysis of a variety of phenomena such as literature, cinema, rock music, literary/cultural theories, as well as the practice of literature (socialist realism) and socio-political life.

Imperfect Ideal

Imperfect Ideal PDF Author: Denise Ahlquist
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781939014207
Category : Dystopias
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Feminist Utopia Project

The Feminist Utopia Project PDF Author: Alexandra Brodsky
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
ISBN: 1558619011
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
This “incredible addition to the feminist canon” brings together the most inspiring, creative, and courageous voices concerning modern women’s issues (Jessica Valenti, editor of Yes Means Yes). In this groundbreaking collection, more than fifty cutting-edge feminist writers—including Melissa Harris-Perry, Janet Mock, Sheila Heti, and Mia McKenzie—invite us to imagine a world of freedom and equality in which: An abortion provider reinvents birth control . . . The economy values domestic work . . . A teenage rock band dreams up a new way to make music . . . The Constitution is re-written with women’s rights at the fore . . . The standard for good sex is raised with a woman’s pleasure in mind . . . The Feminist Utopia Project challenges the status quo that accepts inequality and violence as a given, “offering playful, earnest, challenging, and hopeful versions of our collective future in the form of creative nonfiction, fiction, visual art, poetry, and more” (Library Journal).

Visions of Utopia

Visions of Utopia PDF Author: John Egerton
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9780870492136
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 95

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Book Description
Visionaries of all ages and places have pursued Utopias, dreaming impossible dreams of starting over in new communities fashioned more closely to their ideals. In Visions of Utopia, John Egerton traces the fascinating history of the experimental communities founded by such groups in Tennessee. He focuses in particular on three extraordinary colonies of the 19th century, each of them widely known in its time: Nashoba, and interracial settlement near Memphis in 1825; Rugby, an English cooperative community on the Cumberland Plateau in 1880; and Ruskin, a socialist community in Dickson County in 1894. John Egerton is a native Southerner - A Georgian by birth, a Kentuckian in his childhood and youth, a Floridian during the early 1960's, and a Tennessean since 1965. He is a grandson of one of the English colonists who started the Rugby settlement in 1880. As a journalist and author, he has written articles on a variety of subjects for more than twenty magazines, and has published two books about the South: A Mind to Stay Here (1970) and The Americanization of Dixie (1974).

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia

Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia PDF Author: Nathaniel Robert Walker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198861443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
A study of British and American Utopian writing of the 1800s in the context of developments in real architectural, political, and cultural life. The book studies utopian visions published in the UK and the USA in the 1800s by writers such Robert Owen, James Silk Buckingham, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris.

A Conflict of Visions

A Conflict of Visions PDF Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465004660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Thomas Sowell’s “extraordinary” explication of the competing visions of human nature lie at the heart of our political conflicts (New York Times) Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.