Utopia in the Age of Globalization Space, Representation, and the World-System

by Tally Jr., Robert T

• ISBN13: 9780230391895
• ISBN10: 0230391893
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-02-26
• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot

Summary

Although normally associated with modernity or modernism, utopia has made a comeback in the age of globalization. Just as the discoveries of the New World and the social upheavals of early modern Europe inspired Thomas More's Utopia and its many descendants, the bewildering technological shifts and economic uncertainties of the present era call for new approaches. The explosion of utopian studies since the 1960s, particularly in the work of such theorists as Herbert Marcuse and Fredric Jameson, suggests that utopia may find its true vocation as both a critical practice and anticipatory desire in this postmodern moment of global capitalism. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, Robert T. Tally Jr. draws upon recent utopian theory to argue that utopia is best understood today, not as an ideal society or a future state, but as a mode of literary cartography. The utopian project is an attempt to map the present world system in its totality.

Author Biography

Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA. He is the author of Spatiality (The New Critical Idiom), Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel, and Melville, Mapping and Globalization, as well as the editor of Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the translator of Bertrand Westphal's Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: 'A map of the world which does not contain Utopia'
1. The End of Utopia at the Present Time
2. A Meditation on the Impossible
3. Power to the Imagination
4. Mapping the Postnational World System
Conclusion: Hic Sunt Dracones
Bibliography
Index