Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernit

Description: Imaginary Communities by Phillip Wegner Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. It considers the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas Mores sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity.As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, JÜrgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha. Flap " Imaginary Communities is a beautiful treatment of utopian narratives as the quintessential genre for figuring social space in the modern nation-state. Wegner demonstrates a wide-ranging yet lighthanded philosophical learnedness, an urgent political conscience, and a deeply historical sense that narrative utopias are like specters that haunt particular moments of upheaval, crisis, and contradiction within modernity: whether the threshold between the vestiges of feudal agrarian society and early modern English capitalism, conflicts between the new oligarchy of industrializing late 19th c. United States and the increasing militancy of the labor movement, the uneven successes and failures of the Russian Revolution of 1905, or the mid-century Cold War struggles."--Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics "In this important book, Wegner argues that the historical work done by utopian narratives should be reconsidered, interrogated, challenged--and continued. Insightful and provocative, Imaginary Communities will prove a valuable contribution to our thinking about the politics of imagination."--Daniel Cottom, author of Cannibals and Philosophers: Bodies of Enlightenment "Phillip Wegners Imaginary Communities represents a major intervention in our understanding not merely of utopian literature, but the very ways in which we view our world. His concept of utopian narrative as both vision and practice, as participating in "real" worlds, a force for change rooted in the social world "as it is" and as it is becoming and is "imagined," succeeds wonderfully well; his notion of the imperative of "failure" as a resource of hope is deeply humane. He provides a body of work worth thinking through and thinking with. As a historian, I find the historicity of his approach, the literary arch spanning from the origins of the European nation-state to our global present and future, compelling in its ambition and execution. Wegner moves well beyond the more tired moves of "new historicist" literary criticism: this is historicist scholarship in a new key."--James Epstein, author of Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 Author Biography Phillip E. Wegner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida. Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: The Reality of Imaginary Communities 1. Genre and the Spatial Histories of Modernity The Institutional Being of Genre Space and Modernity Estrangement and the Temporality of Utopia 2. Utopia and the Birth of Nations Re-authoring, or the Origins of Institutions Utopiques and Conceptualized Space Crime and History Utopia and the Nation-Thing Utopia and the Work of Nations 3. Writing the New American (Re)Public: Remembering and Forgetting in Looking Backward Remembering The Contemporary Cul-de-Sac Fragmentation Consumerism and Class "The Associations of Our Active Lifetime" Forgetting 4. The Occluded Future: Red Star and The Iron Heel as "Critical Utopias" Red Star and the Horizons of Russian Modernity The Long Revolution of The Iron Heel "Nameless, Formless Things" "Gaseous Vertebrate" Simplification and the New Subject of History 5. A Map of Utopias "Possible Worlds": Zamyatins We and Le Guins The Dispossessed Reclaiming We for Utopia The City and the Country Happiness and Freedom The Play of Possible Worlds Wes Legacy: The Dispossessed and the Limits of the Horizon 6. Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Ends of Nations in Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four From Utopian Modernism to Naturalist Utopia Orwell and Mannheim: Nineteen Eighty-Four as "Conservative Utopia" The Crisis of Modern Reason Modernization against Modernity: The Culture Industry and "Secondary Orality" "If there was hope...": Orwells Intellectuals Notes Index Review "Wegner demonstrates a wide-ranging yet lighthanded philosophical learnedness, an urgent political conscience, and a deeply historical sense that narrative utopias are like specters that haunt particular moments of upheaval, crisis, and contradiction within modernity: whether the threshold between the vestiges of feudal agrarian society and early modern English capitalism, conflicts between the new oligarchy of industrializing late nineteenth-century United States and the increasing militancy of the labor movement, the uneven successes and failures of the Russian Revolution of 1905, or the mid-century Cold War struggles."-Lisa Lowe, author of immigrant Acts; "Insightful and provocative.... A valuable contribution to our thinking about the politics of imagination."-Daniel Cottom, author of Cannibals and Philosophies Long Description Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas Mores sixteenth-century workUtopiato some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, J Details ISBN0520228294 Short Title IMAGINARY COMMUNITIES Publisher University of California Press Language English ISBN-10 0520228294 ISBN-13 9780520228290 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2002 Imprint University of California Press Country of Publication United States Place of Publication Berkerley Subtitle Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity DOI 10.1604/9780520228290 UK Release Date 2002-06-04 AU Release Date 2002-06-04 NZ Release Date 2002-06-04 US Release Date 2002-06-04 Author Phillip Wegner Pages 323 Publication Date 2002-06-04 DEWEY 321.07 Illustrations 6 line illustrations Audience Professional & Vocational We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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