Imaginary Communities

by Wegner, Phillip E.

• ISBN13: 9780520228283
• ISBN10: 0520228286
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

Imaginary Communities explores the genre of utopian literature as a tool for understanding the literary, cultural and social theories of modern spatiality.

Author Biography

Phillip E. Wegner is Associate Professor of Enlish at the University of Florida

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: The Reality of Imaginary Communities	p. xv
Genre and the Spatial Histories of Modernity	p. 1
The Institutional Being of Genre	p. 4
Space and Modernity	p. 10
Estrangement and the Temporality of Utopia	p. 17
Utopia and the Birth of Nations	p. 27
Reauthoring, or the Origins of Institutions	p. 27
Utopiques and Conceptualized Space	p. 34
Crime and History	p. 40
Utopia and the Nation-Thing	p. 45
Utopia and the Work of Nations	p. 59
Writing the New American (Re)Public: Remembering and Forgetting in Looking Backward	p. 62
Remembering	p. 62
The Contemporary Cul-de-Sac	p. 65
Fragmentation	p. 68
Consumerism and Class	p. 74
"The Associations of Our Active Lifetime"	p. 81
Forgetting	p. 87
The Occluded Future: Red Star and The Iron Heel as "Critical Utopias"	p. 99
Red Star and the Horizons of Russian Modernity	p. 102
The Long Revolution of The Iron Heel	p. 116
"Nameless, Formless Things"	p. 119
"Gaseous Vertebrate"	p. 126
Simplification and the New Subject of History	p. 132
A Map of Utopia's "Possible Worlds": Zamyatin's We and Le Guin's The Dispossessed	p. 147
Reclaiming We for Utopia	p. 147
The City and the Country	p. 151
Happiness and Freedom	p. 158
The Play of Possible Worlds	p. 161
We's Legacy: The Dispossessed and the Limits of the Horizon	p. 172
Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Ends of Nations in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four	p. 183
From Utopian Modernism to Naturalist Utopia	p. 185
Orwell and Mannheim: Nineteen Eighty-Four as "Conservative Utopia"	p. 192
The Crisis of Modern Reason	p. 197
Modernization against Modernity: The Culture Industry and "Secondary Orality"	p. 208
"If there was hope ...": Orwell's Intellectuals	p. 216
Notes	p. 229
Index	p. 287
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