Futurescapes : : space in utopian and science fiction discourses / / edited by Ralph Pordzik.

• Superior document: Spatial practices, 9
• TeilnehmendeR: Pordzik, Ralph, 1966-
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Spatial practices ; 9.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (367 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

This book testifies to the growing interest in the many spaces of utopia . It intends to ‘map out’ on utopian and science-fiction discourses some of the new and revisionist models of spatial analysis applied in Literary and Cultural Studies in recent years. The aim of the volume is to side-step the established generic binary of utopia and dystopia or science fiction and thus to open the analysis of utopian literature to new lines of inquiry. The essays collected here propose to think of utopias not so much as fictional texts about future change and transformation but as vital elements in a cultural process through which social, spatial and subjective identities are formed. Utopias can thus be read as textual systems implying a distinct spatial and temporal dimension; as ‘spatial practices’ that tend to naturalize a cultural and social construction – that of the ‘good life’, the radically improved welfare state, the Christian paradise, the counter-society, et cetera – and make that representation operational by interpellating their readers in some determinate relation to their givenness as sites of political and individual improvement. This volume is of interest for all scholars and students of literature who wish to explore the ways in which utopias of the past and recent present have circulated as media of cultural exchange and homogenization, as sites of cultural and linguistic appropriation and as foci for the spatial formation of national and regional identities in the English-speaking world.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- The Overlaid Spaces of Utopia -- The Translation of Paradise: Thomas More’s Utopia and the Poetics of Cultural Exchange / Gabriela Schmidt -- Utopia, Nation-Building, and the Dissolution of the Nation-State Around 1900 / Hans Ulrich Seeber -- Discoveries of the Future: Herbert G. Wells and the Eugenic Utopia / Richard Nate -- Persistence of Obedience: Theological Space and Ritual Conversion in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four / Ralph Pordzik -- ‘And is not every Manor a Little Common Wealth?’ Nostalgia, Utopia and the Country House / Nicole Pohl -- The Watchdogs of Eden: Chesterton and Buchan Look at the Present of the Future / Christoph Ehland -- The Land that Time Forgot: Fictions of Antarctic Temporality / Elizabeth Leane -- “The Tower of Babble”?1 The Role and Function of Fictive Languages in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction / Dunja M. Mohr -- Rethinking Deterritorialization: Utopian and Apocalyptic Space in Recent American Fiction / Martina Mittag -- Space Construction as Cultural Practice: Reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer with Respect to Postmodern Concepts of Space / Doreen Hartmann -- Peripheral Cosmopolitans: Caribbeanness as Transnational Utopia? / Saskia Schabio -- “Utopian and Cynical Elements”: Chaplin, Cinema, and Weimar Critical Theory / Antonis Balasopoulos -- Index.