Utopian Studies, vol 20, no 1

A publication of the Society for Utopian Studies, 2009.

Included in this volume are the following articles:

“Socioeconomic Utopianism in Spain at the End of the Nineteenth Century: La Nueva Utopía by Ricardo Mella” by José Luis Ramos-Gorostiza

“Homus Novus: The New Man as Allegory” by Natalia Skradol

“Embodied Anarchy in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed by Daniel P. Jaeckle

“Visions of Happiness: Daoist Utopias and Grotto Paradises in Early and Medieval Chinese Tales” by Sing-chen Lydia Chiang

“The Shaker ‘Gift’ Economy: Charisma, Aesthetic Practice and Utopian Communalism” by Janet Sarbanes

“When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs: Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia” by John Hickman

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The Ecological Thought

Author: Timothy Morton

Publication Info: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

“In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does “Nature” exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life. Realizing this interconnectedness is what Morton calls the ecological thought.

In three concise chapters, Morton investigates the profound philosophical, political, and aesthetic implications of the fact that all life forms are interconnected. As a work of environmental philosophy and theory, The Ecological Thought explores an emerging awareness of ecological reality in an age of global warming. Using Darwin and contemporary discoveries in life sciences as root texts, Morton describes a mesh of deeply interconnected life forms—intimate, strange, and lacking fixed identity.

A “prequel” to his Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard, 2007), The Ecological Thought is an engaged and accessible work that will challenge the thinking of readers in disciplines ranging from critical theory to Romanticism to cultural geography.”

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