Imaginary Communities

by Wegner, Phillip E.

• ISBN13: 9780520228290
• ISBN10: 0520228294
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-01
• 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	xi
Introduction: The Reality of Imaginary Communities	xv
Genre and the Spatial Histories of Modernity	1	(26)
The Institutional Being of Genre	4	(6)
Space and Modernity	10	(7)
Estrangement and the Temporality of Utopia	17	(10)
Utopia and the Birth of Nations	27	(35)
Reauthoring, or the Origins of Institutions	27	(7)
Utopiques and Conceptualized Space	34	(6)
Crime and History	40	(5)
Utopia and the Nation-Thing	45	(14)
Utopia and the Work of Nations	59	(3)
Writing the New American (Re)Public: Remembering and Forgetting in Looking Backward	62	(37)
Remembering	62	(3)
The Contemporary Cul-de-Sac	65	(3)
Fragmentation	68	(6)
Consumerism and Class	74	(7)
``The Associations of Our Active Lifetime''	81	(6)
Forgetting	87	(12)
The Occluded Future: Red Star and The Iron Heel as ``Critical Utopias''	99	(48)
Red Star and the Horizons of Russian Modernity	102	(14)
The Long Revolution of The Iron Heel	116	(3)
``Nameless, Formless Things''	119	(7)
``Gaseous Vertebrate''	126	(6)
Simplification and the New Subject of History	132	(15)
A Map of Utopia's ``Possible Worlds'': Zamyatin's We and Le Guin's The Dispossessed	147	(36)
Reclaiming We for Utopia	147	(4)
The City and the Country	151	(7)
Happiness and Freedom	158	(3)
The Play of Possible Worlds	161	(11)
We's Legacy: The Dispossessed and the Limits of the Horizon	172	(11)
Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Ends of Nations in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four	183	(46)
From Utopian Modernism to Naturalist Utopia	185	(7)
Orwell and Mannheim: Nineteen Eighty-Four as ``Conservative Utopia''	192	(5)
The Crisis of Modern Reason	197	(11)
Modernization against Modernity: The Culture Industry and ``Secondary Orality''	208	(8)
``If there was hope...'': Orwell's Intellectuals	216	(13)
Notes	229	(58)
Index	287