Description
Book SynopsisThis collection brings together for the first time Peter Fitting’s writings about the utopian impulse as expressed in science fiction, fantasy, cinema, architecture, and cultural theory. These wide-ranging essays trace the constant reconsideration of the utopian project itself over the past four decades, from its mid-twentieth century period of decline to its revival in counter-cultural science fiction of the 1960s and ‘70s, its second decline with the «dystopian turn» in film, and the rise of feminist pessimism in the 1980s.
These pages reveal what popular utopian, dystopian, and science-fiction narratives tell us about today’s most pressing political issues, including gender equity, education reform, technological change, capitalist excess, state-sanctioned violence, and the challenges of effecting lasting political change. Through analyses of various popular genres and media, the author demonstrates how utopian visions written from particular political perspectives transcend narrowly partisan concerns to stoke our collective desire for another world and a more adequate human future, teaching us how to become the citizens and subjects that a utopian society demands.
Table of ContentsList of Figures – List of Tables – Acknowledgments – Editor’s Preface – Introduction – History and Genre – The Modern Anglo-American SF Novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Co-optation – Contemporary Fantasy and the Utopian Impulse – Ideological Foreclosure and Utopian Discourse – Utopia Beyond Our Ideals: The Dilemma of the Right-Wing Utopia – Buried Treasures: Reconsidering Holberg’s Niels Klim in the World Underground – Fredric Jameson and Anti-Anti-Utopianism – A Short History of Utopian Studies – Gender and Audience – Positioning and Closure: On the “Reading Effect” of Contemporary Utopian Fiction – “So We All Became Mothers”: New Roles for Men in Recent Utopian Fiction – The Turn from Utopia in Recent Feminist Fiction – Reconsiderations of the Separatist Paradigm in Recent Feminist Science Fiction – Beyond the Wasteland: A Feminist in Cyberspace – Violence and Utopia: John Norman and Pat Califia – Utopian Effect / Utopian Pleasure – Cinema, Space, and Technology – What Is Utopian Film? An Introductory Taxonomy – The Second Alien – Futurecop: The Neutralization of Revolt in Blade Runner – You’re History, Buddy: Postapocalyptic Visions in Recent Science Fiction Film – Urban Planning/Utopian Dreaming: Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh Today – Beyond This Horizon: Utopian Visions and Utopian Practice – Bibliography – Index.
