Becoming Utopian: The Culture and Politics of Radical Transformation

by Tom Moylan

Overview

A dream of a better world is a powerful human force that inspires activists, artists, and citizens alike. In this book Tom Moylan – one of the pioneering scholars of contemporary utopian studies – explores the utopian process in its individual and collective trajectory from dream to realization. Drawing on theorists such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway and Alain Badiou and science fiction writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and China Miéville, Becoming Utopian develops its argument for sociopolitical action through studies that range from liberation theology, ecological activism, and radical pedagogy to the radical movements of 1968. Throughout, Moylan speaks to the urgent need to confront and transform the global environmental, economic, political and cultural crises of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350190085
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/21/2022
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Tom Moylan is Glucksman Professor Emeritus at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Founder of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies and an internationally recognised scholar and teacher, his previous books inclide Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Uropian Imagination (1986).

Table of Contents

Preface, Ruth Levitas

Introduction: Becoming Utopian
1. Strong Thought in Hard Times: Utopia, Pedagogy, Agency
2. Bloch Against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function
3. Denunciation/Annunciation: The Utopian Methodology of Liberation Theology
4. Look Into the Dark: On Dystopia and the Novum
5. Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction
6. N-H-N: Kim Stanley Robinson's Dialectics of Ecology
7. "To Live Consciously is to Sow the Whirlwind": Reflecions on the Utopian Standpoint of Nonviolence
8. Steps of Renewed Praxis: Tracking the Utopian Method
9. Still Demanding the Impossible: '68 and the Critical Utopian Imagination

Afterword, Philip E. Wegner (University of Florida, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This is the kind of book that utopian studies needs." - Pedagogy, Culture & Society

"Becoming Utopian is an invaluable explication of utopian thought and its link to sf since the 1960s. The book also provides a model for how producing knowledge in these fields is a pedagogically enriching as well as intellectually satisfying engagement with the world in which we live." - Science Fiction Studies

“Becoming Utopian is a synthesis of engagements and concerns and a completion of hermeneutic and political wagers, a vital addition to socially conscious and politically engaged scholarship, and a contribution that may prove as lasting as Moylan's two major works that preceded it. It is mature, engaged, and urgent at once, just as it is both profoundly self-reflexive and passionately attuned to the difference inherent in utopian rupture. It is an always already classical work, for it is a work of authentic humanist sensibility that is poised to inspire and nurture scholarship for years to come.” —Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos, University of Cyprus

From the Publisher