Utopias of One

Utopias of One

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  • Author: Joshua Kotin
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 0691196540
  • Category : Literary Criticism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 216

Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular—and thus exclusive and inimitable. Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.


Tale Of Two Utopias

Tale Of Two Utopias

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  • Author: Paul Berman
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
  • ISBN: 9780393316759
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 356

Political journalist Paul Berman recounts four episodes in the history of a generation: student radicalism of the years around 1968; the birth of gay liberation and modern identity politics; the anti-Communist trajectory in the Eastern bloc; and the ideals and self-criticism of thinkers in America and in France, who debated the meaning of these events. A "New York Times" Notable Book.


Utopias

Utopias

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  • Author: Catriona Kelly
  • Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Modernism (Literature)
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 420

Russian Modernism began with the triumph of the symbolist style and survived until the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s. It was an age bristling with visions of glorious or terrifying futures, with manifestos for new artistic movements, and with furious feuds between them. Utopias brings together Mikhail Bakhtin's celebrated analysis of "carnival culture"; reflections by painter and stage designer Leon Bakst and film director Sergei Einstein; and major texts by Isaac Babel and Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak; as well as many works by less well-known but equally talented figures. This richly illustrated collection offers an astonishing look at one of history's most stimulating artistic eras.


Utopia

Utopia

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  • Author: Thomas More
  • Publisher: Good Press
  • ISBN:
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 113

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.


Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

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  • Author: Lyman Tower Sargent
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford
  • ISBN: 0191614424
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 160

There are many debates about utopia - What constitutes a utopia? Are utopias benign or dangerous? Is the idea of utopianism essential to Christianity or heretical? What is the relationship between utopia and ideology? This Very Short Introduction explores these issues and examines utopianism and its history. Lyman Sargent discusses the role of utopianism in literature, and in the development of colonies and in immigration. The idea of utopia has become commonplace in social and political thought, both negatively and positively. Some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism with violence an inevitable part of the mix. Others see utopia directly connected to freedom and as a necessary element in the fight against totalitarianism. In Christianity utopia is labelled as both heretical and as a fundamental part of Christian belief, and such debates are also central to such fields as architecture, town and city planning, and sociology among many others Sargent introduces and summarizes the debates over the utopia in literature, communal studies, social and political theory, and theology. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.


Sulphuric Utopias

Sulphuric Utopias

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  • Author: Lukas Engelmann
  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • ISBN: 0262538733
  • Category : Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 316

How early twentieth century fumigation technologies transformed maritime quarantine practices and inspired utopian visions of disease-free global trade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fumigation technologies transformed global practices of maritime quarantine through chemical and engineering innovation. One of these technologies, the widely used Clayton machine, blasted sulphuric acid gas through a docked ship in an effort to eliminate pathogens, insects, and rats while leaving the cargo and the structure of the vessel unharmed, shortening its time in quarantine and minimizing the risk of importing infectious diseases. In Sulphuric Utopias, Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris examine this overlooked but historically crucial practice at the intersection of epidemiology, hygiene, applied chemistry, and engineering. They show how maritime fumigation inspired utopian visions of disease-free trade to improve global shipping and to encourage universally applicable standards of sanitation and hygiene. Engelmann and Lynteris chart the history of ideas about fumigation, disinfection, and quarantine, and chronicle the development of the Clayton machine in 1880s New Orleans. Built by the Louisiana Board of Health and adapted and patented by Thomas Clayton, the machine offered a barrier against bacteria and pests and enabled a highway to global trade. Engelmann and Lynteris chronicle the Clayton machine's success and examine its competitors, including carbon-based fumigation methods in Germany and the Ottoman Empire as well as the “Sulfurozador” in Argentina. They follow the international standardization of maritime fumigation and explore the Clayton machine's decline after World War I, when visions of “sulphuric utopia” were replaced by a pragmatic acknowledgment of epidemiological complexity.


Utopia Drive

Utopia Drive

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  • Author: Erik Reece
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • ISBN: 0374710759
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 368

For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly


Utopianism for a Dying Planet

Utopianism for a Dying Planet

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  • Author: Gregory Claeys
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 0691236690
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 608

How the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.


Black Utopias

Black Utopias

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  • Author: Jayna Brown
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 1478021233
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 127

In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.


Utopias Elsewhere

Utopias Elsewhere

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  • Author: Anthony Daniels
  • Publisher: Crown
  • ISBN: 9780517585481
  • Category : Communism
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 202

Explores Cuba, North Korea, Albania, Romania, and Vietnam and provides a history showing the effects of the ideology of communism on each of them.