"Hope isn't stupid": The Appropriation of Dystopia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anti-Utopia and Dystopia: Rethinking the Generic Field
Utopia Project Archive, 2006-2010, ed. Vassilis Vlastaras. Athens: School of Fine Arts Publications, 2011
If anxiety over the delimitation of the object of study constitutes the universal symptom of every emerging disciplinary field, the field of Utopian Studies -codified as such in the mid 1970s 1 -can be said to constitute a particularly vexed case. In his tellingly entitled "Utopia-The Problem of Definition", published in the inaugural year of The Society for Utopian Studies, Lyman Tower Sargent began by noting that "[t]he major problem facing anyone interested in utopian literature is the definition or, more precisely, the limitation of the field". 2 More recent forays, including Sargent's own, are wont to draw attention to the frustrating inflation of a term which has served polemical denunciation more frequently than analytical understanding, one which often indifferently includes not simply generically divergent kinds of literary texts, but also architectural plans and urban renewal projects, aesthetic and political manifestos, accounts emerging out of so-called "intentional communities", non-fictional blueprints on social transformation, or millenarian fantasies. 3 It is not the purpose of this essay to address the interpretive problems and questions raised in such chartings of Utopian terrain. What is more pertinent to my purposes here is to note that they have involved an increasing amount of attention to the nature and function of those literary and cultural genres that are taken to exempt themselves from any properly "Utopian" mainstream; namely, those of anti-Utopia and dystopia.
Office phone: 517-607-2724 Office: Kendall 406 Office hours: Monday 11:00-12:00, Wednesday 9:30-10:30 and 3:30-5:00, Friday 2:30-3:30; and by appointment "The bounds of the possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think-it is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that constrict them. Base souls do not believe in great men; vile slaves smile mockingly at the word freedom." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau "For if one really believes that such a [final] solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever-what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken…." -Isaiah Berlin "But perhaps…there is a model of [the just city] in the heavens, for anyone who wants to look at it and to make himself its citizen on the strength of what he sees." -Plato
The politics of hope: Utopia as an exercise in social imagination
In: Utopian Thinking in Law, Politics, Architecture and Technology: Hope in a Hopeless World, ed. by B. van Klink, M. Soniewicka, L. van der Broeke, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022
The notion “utopia” in the common usage of the term includes such elements as: 1) improvement of the human condition by human effort; and 2) attainability of a final stage of improvement. Soniewicka criticizes the idea of utopia in this meaning by highlighting the danger of transforming a utopia into an ideology. After rejecting the idea of utopia as a final stage of human perfection, she analyses the idea of utopia by means of a method introduced by Paul Ricœur and further developed by Levitas. Three main functions of utopia described by Ricœur – escape, critique, and reconstruction – can be useful in exercising social imagination. Building on this assumption, Soniewicka illustrates the idea of practicing utopia by the example of a Polish anti-communist artistic movement called the Orange Alternative which embodies the idea of prefigurative acts of social change.
Hope Abjuring Hope: On the Place of Utopia in Realist Political Theory (Political Theory)
Political Theory, 2018
This essay reconstructs the place of utopia in realist political theory, by examining the ways in which the literary genre of critical utopias can productively unsettle ongoing discussions about “how to do political theory.” I start by analyzing two prominent accounts of the relationship between realism and utopia: “real utopia” (Erik Olin Wright et al.) and “dystopic liberalism” (Judith Shklar et al.). Elaborating on Raymond Geuss’s recent reflections, the essay then claims that an engagement with literature can shift the focus of these accounts. Utopian fiction, I maintain, is useful for comprehending what is (thus enhancing our understanding of the world) and for contemplating what might be (thus nurturing the hope for a better future). Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed deploys this double function in an exemplary fashion: through her dynamic and open-ended portrayal of an Anarchist community, Le Guin succeeds in imagining a utopia that negates the status quo, without striving to construct a perfect society. The book’s radical, yet ambiguous, narrative hence reveals a strategy for locating utopia within realist political theory that moves beyond the positions dominating the current debate. Reading The Dispossessed ultimately demonstrates that realism without utopia is status quo–affirming, while utopia without realism is wishful thinking.
Utopianism: Literary and Political
Utopian Horizons: Ideology, Politics, Literature, 2017
The introduction to the edited volume Utopian Horizons (CEU Press, Budapest and New York, 2017) discusses the problems arising during the analysis of utopianism, the necessity of the coopration of literary scholars, political scientist and historians of ideas. These disciplines treat certain concepts, such as fictionality or the role of the author differently. An excerpt is uploaded, for a full text contact CEU Press or email the author.
Mapping the Unmappable: Dichotomies of Utopianism
Filozofski vestnik, 2017
The 500th anniversary of the first edition of Thomas More's Utopia was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible wave of discussions, conferences, and publications on utopianism and its innumerable well-and less-known forms. All this buzz around the topic showed, on the one hand, that there is plenty of interest in utopia at the beginning of the 21st century, most notably in academia given that utopian studies are thriving, and researchers are publishing books and articles on a regular basis. On the other hand, however, at least in developed countries, there has been a growing tendency toward dystopia for the last couple of decades, and utopia became predominantly a pejorative word-a way to insult someone for his or her political orientation.
ON UTOPIAN THINKING: LITERATURE AND THE IMAGINATION OF THE FUTURE TO COME
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION, 2022
The concept of utopia, which seems to have lost its conceptual power in the second half of the twentieth century, is increasingly returning to the center of debates on the relationship between literature and social change. Utopian thinking is now seen as a fundamental space for coming to terms with the present age-an age defined by pandemics, environmental destruction, and the threat to the narrative of freedom. But how do we go about rehabilitating utopia-itself a product of the long history of European domination-and make it adaptable to our postcolonial situation? How can the utopic be harnessed as an alternative way of imagining postcolonial futures? And is it capable of restoring idealism as a horizon of our expectations and as a precondition for freedom? Drawing on texts from the discourse of decolonization debates about utopian thinking in works of postcolonial literature and neo-Marxist criticism, my paper will address some of the ways in which the imaginative is asked to sustain the idea of an alternative society in moments of crisis and atrophy.
CLCWeb, 2015
Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: