Finding Utopia
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DIY Utopia
Author: Amber Day
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Release Date: 2016-12-22
At first glance, contemporary popular culture, filled with bleak images of the future, seems to have given up on the possibility of positive collective change. Below the surface, however, alternative culture is rife with artist-led projects, activist movements, and subcultural communities of interest that seek to spark the collective imagination and to encourage hunger for alternatives. More playfully self-conscious than past utopian movements, today’s are often whimsical or ironic, but are still entirely earnest. Artists invite us to re-author city maps, or archive individual ideas for the future, while maker collectives urge us to rethink our relationship to consumer goods. All seem to have grown out of a similar do-it-yourself ethos and alternative culture. One of the central conflicts informing these case studies is that while it remains immensely difficult to envision anything outside of the current system of consumer capitalism, there is nevertheless a powerful desire to take it apart in piecemeal ways. We see the longing for new social and political narratives, new forms of communion and sociability, and new imaginings of the possible, longings that are currently unmet by mainstream culture, but that are taking expression in myriad ways at the local level. Taken as a whole, this collection examines what our grand ideals and playful daydreams tell us about ourselves.
Utopia Antiqua
Utopia Antiqua is a fresh look at narratives of the Golden Age and decline in ancient Roman literature of the late Republic and imperial period. Through the lens of utopian theory, Rhiannon Evans looks at the ways that Roman authors, such as Virgil, Ovid and Tacitus, use and reinvent Greek myths of the ages, considering them in their historical and artistic context. This book explores the meanings of the ‘Iron Age’ and dystopia for Roman authors, as well as the reasons they give for this decline, and the possibilities for a renewed Age of Gold. Using case studies, it considers the cultural effects of importing luxury goods and the way that it gives rise to a rhetoric of Roman decline. It also looks at the idealisation of farmers, soldiers and even primitive barbarians as parallels to the Golden Race and role models for now-extravagant Romans.
Consuming Utopia
Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective of cultural studies. With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a ‘politics’, it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics. An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory.