Considers the uses and dangers of utopian thinking in the postmodern world.
Utopia has emerged in recent years as the high concept of postmodernism. It has been described as our worst enemy and as what we most desire, but one can hardly propose a theory of the postmodern condition without accounting for it. This volume gathers together the work of political scientists and architects, art historians and literary critics, specialists on pain and the athletic body, feminist theorists, and science fiction writers who explain how and why utopian desire represents the primary thrust of the postmodern world and what can go wrong with it.
The essays investigate the variety of utopias---the heterotopias---imagined by postmodernity. On the one hand, there are utopias of the body politic: postmodern city-planning projects designed to defeat the unstable forces of nature and society; alternative women's utopias; cities of the mind imagined by architects, sculptors, and writers. Some are real, others are poems. On the other hand, there are utopias of the human body: monuments of muscle envisioned by inveterate bodybuilders; towers of strength and stamina developed by high-performance athletes; paradises of perfect health and sexual pleasure guaranteed by advanced medical technologies. The eight contributors give special emphasis to the quandaries raised by our utopian desires and offer their hopes for and warnings about utopian politics, the American city, sexual happiness, dreams of physical perfection, chronic pain and depression, AIDS research, the future of socialism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the postmodern condition in general.
Contributors are Aaron Betsky, Samuel R. Delany, John Hoberman, Carol Thomas Neely, David B. Morris, Judith N. Shklar, Patricia Anne Simpson, and Barbara Maria Stafford.
A volume in the series RATIO: Institute for the Humanities.
Tobin Siebers is Professor of English, University of Michigan, and editor of the series RATIO: Institute for the Humanities.
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6 x 9, ca 350 pages, illustrationsISBN 0-472-10557-4
cloth 42.50E (tentative)
December