Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming(1 Ralahine Utopian Studies)

Informed by feminist, Marxist, ethnographic, and post-structuralist frameworks, Utopia Method Vision makes a unique contribution to international debates in cultural, literary, sociological, and political studies of utopian theory, texts, and practices. The collection addresses the ways in which the contributors approach their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work in general and their research perspectives in particular. In so doing, the contributors develop a larger, self-critical look at the limits and potential of the entire paradigm by which utopianism is known, studied, critiqued, created, and received.

About the Author :
The Editors: Tom Moylan (Glucksman Professor and Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies, University of Limerick) has published Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination; Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia; and is co-editor of Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Raffaella Baccolini (Professor of English, University of Bologna at Forlì) is author of Tradition, Identity, Desire: Revisionist Strategies in H.D.'s Late Poetry; editor of Le prospettive di genere: Discipline, soglie, confini; and co-editor of Dark Horizons.

Review :
Utopian projects seek, to use Seamus Heaney's words, the rhyming of hope and history; but in existing societies, where hopes are abridged, baffled, or denied, the words merely alliterate. The orientation of hope is towards future plenitude, a prophetic imagining of alternative selves and societies. The contributors to this volume also see that time future is contained in time past and that coming events cast their shadows before them. This work is splendidly interdisciplinary, international in focus, theoretically accomplished, and analytically discerning. The essays bespeak a productive transgression of discourses, genres, and registers, as their authors reflect not only on utopia as method but also on the genesis of their intellectual practice. (Professor Tadhg Foley, Department of English & Chair of the Board, Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway) To read 'Utopia Method Vision' is to plunge into an exhilarating conversation, one in which the study and search for utopia is revealed as both personally and politically transformative. Writing from multiple disciplines and methodologies, the contributors share a common passion for a better world: a re-imagined political and social future. These rich and accessible essays address topics from Renaissance utopias to experimental poetry, from intentional communities to anti-globalization activism. Their theoretical sophistication will offer a new generation of scholars a foundation and inspiration for future work. (Dr. Carrie Hintz, English Department, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and President of the Society for Utopian Studies)