Utopias and the Environment

ISBN-13: 9781138938021 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 116 str.

Geoffrey Berry

Opis

Utopias and the Environment explores the way in which the kind of dreaming, or re-visioning, known as the utopian imaginary takes environmental concerns into account. This kind of creative intervention is increasingly important in an era of ecological crisis, as we witness the failure of governments worldwide to significantly change industrial civilization from a path of business as usual.

In this context, it is up to the artists in this case authors to imagine new ways of being that respond to this imperative and immediate global issue. Concurrently, it is also up to critics, readers, and thinkers everywhere to appraise these narratives of possibility for their complexities and internal conflicts, as well as for their promise, as we enter this new era of rapid change and adaptation. Because creative and critical thinkers must work together towards this goal, the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to the fiction of the 1970s, is now ingrained in the common argot and is one of the key ideas discussed in this book. This development in the genre, which combines self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, represents the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect. This book is testament to such hopes and potential realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of "Green Letters. ""

Spis treści

Introduction  1. Utopias, miniature worlds and global networks in modern Scottish island poetry  2. (Mis)Reading Hardy: ‘Wessex’ as green imaginary  3. Utopian Zionist development in Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland  4. ‘The Republic of Arborea’: trees and the perfect society  5. Hope of a hopeless world: eco-teleology in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood  6. Genre, utopia, and ecological crisis: world-multiplication in Le Guin’s fantasy  7. The Biologisation of Ecofeminism? On Science and Power Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time  8. Afterword: the utopian dreaming of modernity and its ecological cost

O autorze

Geoffrey Berry is an independent scholar, researcher, writer and public speaker who promotes environmental values integrated with a new sense of embodied spirituality.