Tag Archives: Cultural Studies

Utopian Studies, vol 20, no 1

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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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Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community

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Author: Keally McBride

Publication Info: Penn State Press, 2005.

“How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society.”
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Utopian Studies, vol 21, no 1

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A publication of the Society for Utopian Studies, 2010.

Included in this volume are the following articles:

“Preliminary Sketches for the Reappearance of HyBrazil” by Sean Lynch

“A Conversation at Sea” by Matt Packer and Sean Lynch

“Utopian Studies, Environmental Literature, and the Legacy of an Idea: Educating Desire in Miguel Abensour and Ursula K. Le Guin” by Christine Nadir

“Sinking ‘Like a Corpse’ or Living the ‘Soul’s Full Desire’: Shaker Women in Fiction and History” by Richard M. Marshall

“Scottish Utopian Fiction and the Invocation of God” by Timothy C. Baker

“A Grenade With the Fuse Lit: William S. Burroughs and Retroactive Utopias in Cities of the Red Night” by Sean Grattan

“Michael Flürscheim: From the SIngle Tax to Currency Reform” by Lyman Tower Sargent

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Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction

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Authors: Mark Bould and China Miéville

Publication Info: Wesleyan University Press distributed by University Press of New England, 2009.

“A critical exploration of the connections between science fiction and Marxism

Science fiction and socialism have always had a close relationship. Many science fiction novelists and filmmakers have used the genre to examine explicit or implicit Marxist concerns. Red Planets is an accessible and lively account, which makes an ideal introduction to anyone interested in the politics of science fiction. The volume covers a rich variety of examples from Weimar cinema to mainstream Hollywood films, and novelists from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Disch to Ursula K. Le Guin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken MacLeod, and Charles Stross. Contributors include Matthew Beaumont, William J. Burling, Carl Freedman, Darren Jorgensen, Rob Latham, Iris Luppa, Andrew Milner, John Rieder, Steven Shaviro, Sherryl Vint, and Phillip Wegner.”

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Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction

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Authors: Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint.

Publication Info: New York: Routledge, 2009.

“Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction is a collection of engaging essays on some of the most significant figures who have shaped and defined the genre. Diverse groups within the science fiction community are represented, from novelists and film makers to comic book and television writers. Important and influential names discussed include:

Octavia Butler

George Lucas

Robert Heinlein

Gene Roddenberry

Stan Lee

Ursula K. Le Guin

H.G. Wells

This outstanding reference guide charts the rich and varied landscape of science fiction and includes helpful and up-to-date lists of further reading at the end of each entry. Available in an easy to use A-Z format, Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction will be of interest to students of Literature, Film Studies, and Cultural Studies.”

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The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

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Authors: Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint.

Publication Info: New York: Routledge, 2009.

“The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is a comprehensive overview of the history and study of science fiction. It outlines major writers, movements, and texts in the genre, established critical approaches and areas for future study. Fifty-six entries by a team of renowned international contributors are divided into four parts which look, in turn, at:

History – an integrated chronological narrative of the genre’s development

Theory – detailed accounts of major theoretical approaches including feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism and utopian studies

Issues and Challenges – anticipates future directions for study in areas as diverse as science studies, music, design, environmentalism, ethics and alterity

Subgenres – a prismatic view of the genre, tracing themes and developments within specific subgenres.

Bringing into dialogue the many perspectives on the genre The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and the future of science fiction and the way it is taught and studied.”

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A Conservationist Manifesto

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Author: Scott Russell Sanders

Publication Info: Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009.

“As an antidote to the destructive culture of consumption dominating American life today, Scott Russell Sanders calls for a culture of conservation that allows us to savor and preserve the world, instead of devouring it. How might we shift to a more durable and responsible way of life? What changes in values and behavior will be required? Ranging geographically from southern Indiana to the Boundary Waters Wilderness and culturally from the Bible to billboards, Sanders extends the visions of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson to our own day. A Conservationist Manifesto shows the crucial relevance of a conservation ethic at a time of mounting concern about global climate change, depletion of natural resources, extinction of species, and the economic inequities between rich and poor nations. The important message of this powerful book is that conservation is not simply a personal virtue but a public one.”

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Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

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Author: José Esteban Muñoz

Publication Info: New York: NYU Press, 2009.

“The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.

Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.

In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a ‘not yet here’ that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.”

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Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

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Author: Timothy Morton

Publication Info: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

“In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the “nature” they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.

Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading ‘environmentality’ in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: ‘dark ecology.'”

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Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

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Author: Robert Pogue Harrison

Publication Info: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008

“Humans have long turned to gardens—both real and imaginary—for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.

With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.”

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