Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political Epistemology

by Darko Suvin

Overview

This volume incorporates Darko Suvin’s thinking on utopian horizons in fiction and on eutopian and dystopian readings of historical reality since the 1970s. While the focus is on the United States and the United Kingdom, the essays also draw on French, German and Russian sources. The book is composed of eighteen chapters, including four sets of poems. The chapters include heretic reflections on utopian fiction, science fiction and utopian studies, explorations of dystopias, and epistemological examinations of political standpoint. Throughout, plebeian history is the stance from which all the author’s value judgements are made. The essays and poems engage with the empirical world and identify areas of hope. In a dark dystopian time, they reaffirm eutopia, the radically better place to be striven for in every here and now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783039114030
Publisher:	Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	04/04/2010
Pages:	582
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

The Author: Darko Suvin is Professor Emeritus of McGill University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has written thirteen books and hundreds of essays in the areas of utopian and science fiction, comparative literature, dramaturgy, theory of literature, theatre and cultural theory. He has also published three award-winning volumes of poetry.

Table of Contents

Contents: Phillip E. Wegner: Preface: Emerging from the Flood in Which We Are Sinking: Or, Reading with Darko Suvin (Again) – Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, a Proposal, and a Plea (1973) – «Utopian» and «Scientific»: Two Attributes for Socialism from Engels (1976) – Science Fiction and the Novum (1977) – Poems of Doubt and Hope 1983-1988 – Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies (1989) – On William Gibson and Cyberpunk SF (1989-1991) – The Doldrums: Eight Nasty Poems of 1989-1999 – Where Are We? How Did We Get Here? Is There Any Way Out? Or, News from the Novum (1997-1998) – Utopianism from Orientation to Agency: What Are We Intellectuals under Post-Fordism to Do? (1997-1998) – On Cognition as Art and Politics: Reflections for a Toolkit (1997-1999) – What Remains of Zamyatin’s We After the Change of Leviathans? Or, Must Collectivism Be Against People? (1999-2000) – What May the Twentieth Century Amount To: Initial Theses (1999-2000) – A Tractate on Dystopia 2001 (2001, 2006) – Seven Poems from the Utopian Hollow: Diary Notes of 2000-2005 – Living Labour and the Labour of Living: A Tractate for Looking Forward in the Twenty-first Century (2004) – Inside the Whale, or etsi communismus non daretur: Reflections on How to Live When Communism Is a Necessity but Nowhere on the Horizon (2006-2007) – Five Farewell Fantasies of 2006-2008 – Cognition, Freedom, The Dispossessed as a Classic (2007).

Preface

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Editorial Reviews

«We have been waiting for years for this comprehensive statement on Utopia from the most innovative contemporary theorist of this form. A comparatist with a remarkable sweep from Japan and Eastern Europe to the US and Canada, a theater specialist and dramaturg with an emphasis on Brecht, a poet, and a critic of science fiction, whose knowledge of that body of writing ranges from its classics and earliest anticipations to the present, Darko Suvin grasps the form of Utopia in its fundamental social, political, and cultural consequences. This book constitutes an indispensable provocation and a stimulating resource.» (Fredric Jameson, Duke University, author of ‘Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions’)
«Suvin’s book says what no one else is saying in quite this way. Individual chapters – like the ones on Disneyland, salvation, or collectivism – include some of the sharpest analyses of our current reality, and taken together they form an impressive diagnostic. This is a very important achievement in the midst of our general confusion. Establishing the frame necessary for a potential future praxis, Suvin’s book is itself a utopian work couched in the form of socioeconomic and literary criticism, always reminding us of a potential human greatness now mostly wasted. And the poems are beautiful, moving, and deep.» (Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the ‘Mars Trilogy’ and ‘Years of Rice and Salt’)
«If you, as I, wondered what science fiction had to do with all the complex travails of the world left over the past century, then you too may be transported by the poetic political vision of Darko Suvin. It is a journey worth taking.» (Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University, author of ‘Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization and Utopistics’)
«Ohne jede Übertreibung kann man sagen: Will man phantastische Literatur betrachten, kommt man an Darko Suvin nicht vorbei.» (Johannes Rüster, Inklings-Jahrbuch 29, 2011)

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