Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia

Description

Edited by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University, Melbourne, Imagining the Future bridges theory, politics and literature, featuring key articles by and on eminent writers in Utopian Studies, Science Fiction Studies and Social Theory. Inspired by Frederic Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future, it is a fascinatingly diverse response to his proposition that ‘Utopia… now better expresses our relationship to a genuinely political future than any current program of action’ and that Utopia demands a ‘meditation on the impossible’.

Frederic Jameson contributes an article, ‘The Antinomonies of Utopia’, as does Maurice Blanchot, in his hitherto untranslated essay ‘The Proper Uses of Science Fiction’. Lyman Tower Sargent’s bibliographical essay provides the essential historical survey of science and technology in science fiction. There are articles on the novels of Michel Houellebecq and Margaret Atwood, on power in ancient myth, on the rhetorical construction of future-time in the war on terror, as well as an accounting of recent anti-globalization mobilizations around the world. Two articles reflect on specifically Australian utopias – the uses of ‘Aboriginalism’ and Walter Burley Griffins’ utopian conception of Canberra. Writers in cultural theory, psychoanalysis and philosophy take up the work of Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams and Deleuze and Guattari.

This collection is the result of a collaboration between the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies and Arena Publications. Produced as a book, it also constitutes a special double issue of Arena Journal.

Contributors: Fredric Jameson, Peter Fitting, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Dougal McNeill, Ian Buchanan, Verity Burgmann, Jess Whyte, Roland Boer, Kate Rigby, Darren Jorgensen, Andrew Benjamin, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Eugene W. Holland, Paul Jones, Rob Baum, Jacqueline Dutton, Toby Widdicome, David Jack, Andrew Milner, Lyman Tower Sargent, Maurice Blanchot.

Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia
A. Milner, M. Ryan and R. Savage,
Arena Publications, Melbourne, 2006.
ISBN:0-958181-8-9