[csaa-forum] IMAGINING THE FUTURE: UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA edited by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage

[Gail Ward]

Please circulate

IMAGINING THE FUTURE: UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA
Edited by Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage

Arena Publications, Melbourne, 2006
ISBN: 0-958181-8-9
RRP in Australia: $A27.50
Overseas: $A25 + postage
Inquiries: miranda at arena.org.au
Fax: (61) 03 9416 0684

TO ORDER PLEASE FAX YOUR REQUEST USING THE ATTACHED PDF FORM
payment can be made only by Bankcard, Visa or Mastercard

For most of the 20th century, Utopian traditions in politics, philosophy
and art were progressively displaced on the Left by supposedly more
`scientific' understandings of progress, whether liberal, fabian or
marxist. On the Right, Utopia was similarly disposed of by a critique of
Communism as Utopia gone sour. In the 1960s, however, Utopian politics
re-emerged in and around the new social movements and in re-radicalised
sections of the labour movement.

Fredric Jameson is today the most eminent cultural theorist still
working in the marxist tradition, a thinker whose work exhibits an
enduring fascination with Utopianism. In 2005 he published Archaeologies
of the Future, a full-length monograph on the subject. To mark this
event, the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at
Monash University in Melbourne organised a 2-day conference in December
2005, at which Jameson himself was the keynote speaker. The papers in
this volume are taken from that conference.

Jameson writes in Archaeologies that: "Utopia ... now better expresses
our relationship to a genuinely political future than any current
program of action ... it forces us ... to concentrate on ... a
meditation on the impossible, on the unrealizable in its own right".
These papers are intended precisely as a provocation to further such
meditations on the impossible.

CONTENTS

1. Introduction	   Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage

Part I Archaeologies of the Future

2. The Antinomies of Utopia	Fredric Jameson
3. Fredric Jameson and Anti-Anti-Utopianism	Peter Fitting
4. Producing Criticism as Utopia: Fredric Jameson and Science Fiction
Maria Elisa Cevasco
5. Reading the Maps: Realism, Science Fiction and Utopian Strategies
Dougal McNeill

Part II The Politics of Utopia

6. Ideology and Utopia in the work of Fredric Jameson, or, The
Counter-Revolution in the Revolution	Ian Buchanan
7. Archaeologies of Anti-Capitalist Utopianism	Verity Burgmann
8. Critiquing the Violence of Guantanamo: Resisting the Monopolisation
of the Future	Jess Whyte
9. An Un-Original Tale: Utopia Denied in Enuma Elish	Roland Boer

Part III Australian Utopias

10. (Not) by Design: Utopian Moments in the Creation of Canberra	Kate Rigby
11. The Utopian Imagination of Aboriginalism	Darren Jorgensen

Part IV Utopian Theory

12. The Illusion of The Future: Notes on Benjamin and Freud	Andrew Benjamin
13. The Pure Machine's Gambit: Walter Benjamin's Thesis I	Dimitris
Vardoulakis
14. The Utopian Dimension of Thought in Deleuze & Guattari	Eugene Holland
15. `Tragic Utopianism' and Critique in Raymond Williams	Paul Jones

Part V Future Fictions

16. From Herland to Outland: the changing anatomies of gender dystopia
Rob Baum
17. Three French Futures: Australia, Antarctica and Ailleurs	Jacqueline
Dutton
18. Margaret Atwood, Doughnut Holes and the Paradox of Imagining	Toby
Widdicombe
19.  Science Fiction as Historical Novel: Michel Houellebecq's Les
Particules élémentaires	David Jack
20. Framing Catastrophe: The Problem of Ending in Dystopian Fiction
Andrew Milner

Part VI Bibliographical Essay

21. Eutopias and Dystopias of Science	Lyman Tower Sargent

Part VII Archive

22. The Proper Use of Science Fiction	Maurice Blanchot

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Rob Baum teaches in Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash University.
Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Critical Theory at the University of
Technology, Sydney, and in the Centre for Comparative Literature and
Cultural Studies at Monash.
Maurice Blanchot, the French novelist and critic, was born in 1907 and
died in 2003. He once described his life as `wholly devoted to
literature and to the silence unique to it'.
Roland Boer is editor of The Bible and Critical Theory and teaches in
the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash.
Ian Buchanan is Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff
University.
Verity Burgmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne.
Maria Elisa Cevasco is Professor of English Literature and Cultural
Studies at the University of Sao Paolo.
Jacqueline Dutton teaches French at the University of Melbourne.
Peter Fitting has recently retired as Professor of French and Director
of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto.
Eugene Holland is Professor of French and Comparative Studies at Ohio
State University.
David Jack is a postgraduate research student in the Centre for
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash.
Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at
Duke University.
Paul Jones teaches Sociology at the University of New South Wales.
Darren Jorgensen recently completed his PhD thesis in English at the
University of Western Australia.
Dougal McNeill is a postgraduate research student in English at the
University of Melbourne.
Andrew Milner is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Centre for
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash.
Kate Rigby teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural
Studies at Monash.
Matthew Ryan is an editor of Arena Magazine and teaches in the Centre
for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash.
Lyman Tower Sargent is Professor of Politics at the University of
Missouri, St Louis.
Robert Savage teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and
Cultural Studies at Monash.
Dimitris Vardoulakis teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature
and Cultural Studies at Monash and at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Jess Whyte is a postgraduate research student in the Centre for
Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash.
Toby Widdicombe is Professor of English at the University of Alaska
Anchorage and the editor of Utopian Studies.





-- 
Gail Ward
Executive Officer
Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Building 11
Monash University
Victoria 3800
Ph.  (03) 9905 2208
Fax: (03) 9905 5593
Email: gail.ward at arts.monash.edu.au


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