Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantWelcome to Utopian Studies 34.3, the final issue for 2023. We want to start by thanking subscribers (and of course authors!) for their patience as this new editorial team has worked its way, together, through a new “look” and a new format for the journal. This issue reflects all these changes, with a balance of academic articles, an important Critical Forum, several Desire Lines contributions, Book Reviews, and Conference Briefings.The first three stand-alone articles share an interest in the strategic variations of genre and medium that make utopian and dystopian studies so rich. In “No Exit: Death Drive, Dystopia, and the Long Winter of the American Dream in Harold Ramis’s The Ice Harvest,” author Eric Smith features director/actor Harold Ramis’s filmic utopia/dystopia “dyad,” Groundhog Day (1993) and The Ice Harvest (2005), which bookmark a long decade’s worth of economic and political change in the United States. Focusing particularly on “noir” aspects of the later film, Smith traces Ramis’s “strategic reactivation” of film noir as a medium-specific variant of Tom Moylan’s definition of the critical dystopia. The following article, “The Social Prison: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as Post-Anarchist Critical Dystopia” by David Miller, also locates a “strategic reactivation,” this time through the deployment of tropes of carcerality. Positioning the novel’s preoccupation with imprisonment within anarchists’ “longstanding critical engagement” with prisons as state apparatus, Miller argues that Le Guin deftly recalls to us the utopian register of anarchism. Tracing dystopian themes and images of carceral justice through the novel, Miller demonstrates that Le Guin points the reader “toward an open-ended politics of continuous process” that might lead toward a freer society.Peter Sinnema (re)introduces a “long-neglected” work of utopian fiction, Archibald Marshall’s Upsidonia (1915). Taking a cue from Karl Marx’s observation that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur the first time as tragedy, the second as farce,” Sinnema reads Marshall’s text as a farce, and tracks Marshall’s deployment of farce’s “essential maneuvers” of [End Page viii] return and repetition. In staging an “upsidonia” reversal of capitalist principles and relations as “serious buffoonery” (Marx), Marshall’s critique of contemporaneous capitalist formations, argues Sinnema, also places into relief an alternative political model—the one that Marx advanced. In short, this article explores a third formal or generic “strategy.”The final two articles follow Sinnema’s in focusing on utopian literature’s engagement with economic thought. Signe Leth Gammelgaard brings to our attention a Swedish classic by Karin Boye, the dystopian novel Kallocain (1940), which few anglophone scholars are aware of. Beyond detailing the novel’s close engagement with contemporaneous economic thinkers, Gammelgaard also makes a case for our closer attention to interwar dystopian literature’s engagement with economic thought, including mathematics and statistics, a perspective too often overshadowed by the increasingly dark domain of European and global politics and political thought. Contextualizing Kallocain within the early theorizing of the Scandinavian welfare state, Gammelgaard sees this novel as exemplary of the kinds of critique “centered around the citizen’s emotional and interior lives in new planned communities.” Broadening the argument regarding the important role of economic thought and planning in dystopian writing during that period of political peril, Gammelgaard concludes that “new lines of critical inquiry regarding literary texts from the interwar period” are overdue.Finally, Donald Morris investigates three likely more familiar texts from just before and after the turn of the century: Theodor Hertzka’s Freeland (1891), Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland: The Old New Land (1902), and H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905). Morris charts these authors’ common interests in “easing” the effects of wealth disparities that cause social unrest—particularly the increase in rates of poverty. The three novels present alternative “scenarios” in which these disparities are recalibrated, as it were, using a similar set of tools: education, universal healthcare, social safety nets, fiscal transparency, confiscatory estate taxes, and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantThis second issue of Utopian Studies 34 comprises a variety of historically and theoretically grounded contributions, ranging in time and place from medieval Persia to Cold War America to contemporary global media culture. The issue opens with a surprising look back at utopian myth-making... by the U.S. frozen food industry. Author Justin Nordstrom reads a 1954 short story, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which foresees global cooperation, new technologies, and the emancipation of women from domestic labor—all thanks to the advent of frozen meals and microwave cooking. Nordstrom demonstrates how this “frozen fantasy” of the Cold War period reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs (from Cockaigne to Bellamy)—but also challenges their essential arguments.The next several articles reach back in time, first to twelfth-century Persia. In “Utopia’s Cauldron: Travelers’ Lore and Korea (‘Belisa’) in the Persian Epic of Kush the Tusked,” author Kaveh Hemmat revaluates the role of the medieval epic Kushnameh, as an anticipation of later utopian sources connected to Islamic political theory. Hemmat argues that the epic’s focus on the formative processes that make its “quasi-fictional” society of Besila possible results in an important precursor to More’s sixteenth-century text. The “invention” of the utopian genre may have deep roots, the author concludes, in the Kushnameh, with its interest in the development of a paradisiacal city, its articulation of universal monotheism, and its focus on geographical knowledge and travel.The geographical character of the island of Utopia is the subject of Chun Liang Lin and Mark Hansley Chua’s article, “Mapping Utopia as an Enclosed Renaissance Garden.” Participating in the longtime scholarly effort to “map” More’s island nation, the authors report on a mapping experiment that attempts to understand the geomorphology of Utopia according to metaphorical ideals of Renaissance humanism, rather than through mathematical calculation.“An Archival Paradise: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Early Modern Info-Utopianism” by Georgie Newson focuses on the seventeenth-century British philosopher’s proposal for a new “universal language” for use by scholars, travelers, diplomats and others during an expansionist era of exploration and trade. Newsom reclaims the “Essay” as “legitimately” utopian, contesting earlier critical dismissals of it as such and instead claiming it as an early example of what she calls [End Page vi] “info-utopianism.” An info-utopian tendency can be located in a number of other early modern utopian works, the article contends, and it concludes with implications for contemporary utopian theory.The next two essays look toward anticipations of, and responses to, future crisis society: Rafael Baquero asks us to revisit the understudied contributions of Spanish-born Mexican philosopher, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, to contemporary efforts within the Marxist tradition to reclaim utopian Hope. By exploring Sánchez Vasquez’s Philosophy of Praxis and by highlighting its anthropological assumptions, this study demonstrates the extent to which his works provide theoretical underpinnings and resources for contesting contemporary discourses on the “end of history” and for recovering utopia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.Finally, literary scholar M. Keith Booker revisits the stunningly drawn global posthuman world(ing) of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009) in his article, “A New Expansion: Climate Change, Posthumanism, and the Utopian Dimension in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl.” Booker argues that despite the twenty-third-century postapocalyptic setting, the text offers clear elements of hope and “utopian energies,” driven particularly, he argues, by “the motif of genetic engineering,” which opens up possibilities of a more enlightened politics, and of new kinds of relationality between the human and more-than-human world.The second half of this issue marks the appearance of several new Utopian Studies sections. We are delighted to launch The Critical Forum and Desire Lines. The Critical Forum is a space for critical conversation in a “bloc” of essays addressing together a specific theoretical problematic related to utopian, dystopian, and speculative texts or thought. The first Forum features four essays that emerged from a two-day...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors’ MessageJennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Editor, Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Assistant Editor, A. Elisabeth Reichel, Book Review Editor, and Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Editorial AssistantThis issue of Utopian Studies: The Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies comes to you under new editorial leadership. Before introducing ourselves, I wish first of all to extend thanks to former editor Dr. Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University), who served the journal for fourteen years. Her consistent attention to the best scholarship in utopian studies throughout her editorial tenure is deeply appreciated by all who have worked in the field.As a long-time member and former president of the Society for Utopian Studies, I have been engaged for thirty years in utopian studies, mostly from a literary perspective, and mostly focusing on feminist and queer utopian theory and expression. As a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, I am within walking distance of the University Libraries’ Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection, housed within Eberly Family Special Collections Library in University Park since 2003. To this day, the Lewis Utopia Collection continues to expand its holdings of literary and historical texts pertaining to utopian and dystopian thought and literatures, as well as science fiction and related forms of speculative world-making.I am joined by a new Assistant Editor, Dr. Stephanie Peebles Tavera, assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University, Kingsville, who has just published her first book, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship (2022). As one of a “new generation” of utopianists, her influence on the development of the journal will be quickly apparent: don’t be surprised to learn about a podcast series on utopia; or about new kinds of short writing that may join the standard academic article. She is also an award-winning scholar whose work on feminist utopian literature engages women’s and gender studies, disability studies, medical humanities, and critical archival and recovery practices.We are also joined by a new Book Review Editor, Dr. A. Elisabeth Reichel, assistant professor of American Studies at Osnabrück University. She is the author of Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship [End Page vi] of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict (2021), and it was the poetry and anthropology of Ursula K. Le Guin that first drew her into utopian studies. She brings to the journal a keen interest in questions of economic justice and the significance of utopian literatures to ideas about economic freedom and collective economic living. Finally, we welcome Manuel Sousa Oliveira as Editorial Assistant. Manuel is a Ph.D. student at the University of Porto.This new leadership is signaled by a new cover design for the Utopian Studies journal. The cover features a modern stylization of the Kesh Gyre of Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), set against a sunrise fade in the background. The original gyre symbol is reproduced inside the journal, opposite the contents page. We feel that this symbol represents a kind of feminist hope, a symbol of possibility, and a sign of new beginnings and community. These are all values we hope to embody during our editorial tenure. They are things the world needs more of right now. We wish to thank Theo Downes-Le Guin, the youngest son of Ursula K. Le Guin; Margaret Chodos, artist for the artwork of Always Coming Home, including the Kesh Gyre; and the Ursula Le Guin estate for graciously offering permission to feature this image of the late writer’s world-building in our pages.Utopian Studies also enjoys a new editorial description, the text of which you can find on the journal’s Penn State University Press webpage:Now in its thirty-fourth year of publication, Utopian Studies: The Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies publishes scholarly articles on a wide range of subjects related to: utopia and dystopias; utopianism in any creative medium; utopian theory, including political and economic theory; and intentional communities. While retaining the journal’s unique interest in the history of utopia, dystopia, and their expressions in aesthetic and political movements, the new editors are eager to receive submissions offering...

The theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. Compelled to answer to Marx’s denigration of utopia as fantasy, the tendency was to compensate for the absence of a programmatic politics by stressing what is “useful” about utopian dreaming, and therefore where or how exactly a utopian text reveals or creates political drive, or motivates political action. In this essay, I argue that theorists have overlooked the use of utopia as not only the reproduction of difference, or what Malabou calls positive plasticity, but also as, therefore, a disruption; Malabou might prefer the term accident here. Tracing the concept of plasticity from Roland Barthes to Malabou, with a nod at Miguel Abensour, this essay teases out the links between a contemporary notion of plasticity to argue, simply put, that utopia is plastic. This plasticity of the concept ensures its political force. These links, obscured in the essay “Plastic,” Barthes makes only later in his writing. But for Malabou, plasticity underlies a principle of futurity and/as generativity, such that new forms, new meanings, new concepts emerge through difference. Utopia’s horizons of potentiality depend on difference, and on non-achievement. Finally, I argue that the persistence of utopia as a form of thinking is the most important, and political, effect of utopian plasticity.

While the words “utopia” and “anticipation” frequently appear together in discussions of the concepts of utopia and dystopia, little attention to the relationship of Anticipation Studies to utopian studies exists. Moreover, the relevance of literature and the arts to Anticipation Studies seems almost invisible. This essay focuses on the structuring of the original utopian narrative, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, in order to understand how this seminal text conceptualizes utopia’s relation to past, present, and future. This analysis focuses on the complex framing devices characteristic of utopian narrative, as well as its open-endedness. The embedding of narratives sets up the dynamic movement between past, present, and future – the various forms of temporality – that allows us to clarify the nature of utopian anticipation.Throughout the chapter, I attempt to connect utopian textual and conceptual theory to specific concepts in the emerging field of Anticipation Studies, with which Utopian Studies, a long-established interdisciplinary field, have not yet engaged. Of particular interest is the notion, promoted by Miguel Abensour, that utopia is always a disruption and thus not an anticipation in any “natural” or logical sense: “what matters is the orientation toward what is different, the wish for the advent of a radical alterity here and now” : 407, 2008). From this premise, we can reintroduce a neglected literary term from science fiction theorist, Darko Suvin: the novum. The eruption of a future from a point of radical alterity – an ontological accident – opens up radical implication for the nature of utopian anticipation and futurity.Finally the essay suggests that Robert Poli’s and Robert Rosen’s description of an anticipatory system as comprising “the predictive model of itself” within the genre’s formal characteristics is in fact present in the structure of the utopian narratives: that is, that the persistence of utopia – as a literary genre and as a political concept – inheres in the narratological structuring of the possibility of another story and another listener. Utopian narrative thus ultimately anticipates not only temporal relationality, but an ethical relation between the outside narrator, the utopian traveler/narrator, and the reader. It anticipates another story.

Figure used with kind permission of Pie: The Search for Utopia (http://pieonedotzero.wordpress.com). Charles Dickens's Hard Times is not a novel that typically springs to mind in the context of discussions of education in utopia or dystopia. But maybe it should be. Hard Times stages a fierce debate between utopic and dystopic visions of nineteenth-century Britain and the future that it prepares its children for. On one side: Mr. Gradgrind and his school, with a sclerotic curriculum of "Facts, facts, facts" that hardens the heart and the mind and stamps out any spark of imagination. Gradgrind "manufactures," like identical widgets, model citizens in the form of the apathetic Bitzer. On the other side: Mr. ..

ABSTRACT Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell considers the nature of “utopian work”—not simply the kind of work that provides material support for community but rather the kind of “inner” work that reorients individual ethical and political sensibilities, and moves one toward a spiritual maturity that makes frank community with others possible. Drawing from Murdoch's philosophical work, Wagner-Lawlor examines Murdoch's promotion of the “work” that art does in educating our moral sensibilities over the kinds of work her Imber Court communitarians engage in. Murdoch suggests that the real work of utopia is the working of the individual spirit toward an imaginative sympathy that lies at the heart of her conception of a utopian sensibility.