- Paperback: 324 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; illustrated edition edition (1 July 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0520228294
- ISBN-13: 978-0520228290
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
1,193,550 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #51 in Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Government & Politics > Countries & Regions > Europe > Russia
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Review
"Wegner demonstrates a wide-ranging yet lighthanded philosophical learnedness, an urgent political conscience, and a deeply historical sense that narrative utopias are like specters that haunt particular moments of upheaval, crisis, and contradiction within modernity: whether the threshold between the vestiges of feudal agrarian society and early modern English capitalism, conflicts between the new oligarchy of industrializing late nineteenth-century United States and the increasing militancy of the labor movement, the uneven successes and failures of the Russian Revolution of 1905, or the mid-century Cold War struggles."-Lisa Lowe, author of immigrant Acts; "Insightful and provocative.... A valuable contribution to our thinking about the politics of imagination."-Daniel Cottom, author of Cannibals and Philosophies
Product Description
Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity. As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jurgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha.
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First Sentence
Terry Eagleton asks. "What traumatic upheaval of perception is involved in thinking of the political no longer as a question of local sovereignty, of something interwoven with the labor and kinship relations of a specific place, but as an abstract national formation?" Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Terry Eagleton asks. "What traumatic upheaval of perception is involved in thinking of the political no longer as a question of local sovereignty, of something interwoven with the labor and kinship relations of a specific place, but as an abstract national formation?" Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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2 reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
All the World's a Theory
25 Feb 2003
Format:Paperback
In Imaginary Communities, Wegner glides from heady theorists like Jameson and Zizek to popular fiction like Dissposessed and to "cannonical classics" like 1984. Always readable, always introducing and always challenging, Wegner traces the evolution of the 'uptopia' novel while reorienting our reading of distopias by asking 'who's utopia are they?' Wegner sets up the concept of utopia as a mode of reading, asking us to position the texts we encounter in terms of it and in terms of social space as well, thus he discusses nation building and the onset of modernity in terms of the development of the utopia novel. Far reaching and deeply penetrating, whether you're a professor of literature, an avid sci-fi fan, an activist, or even an urban design specialist, Imaginary Communities is a 'place' worth visiting.
4 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Buy this book!
13 Dec 2002
Format:Paperback
You have to buy this book! To explain it would only to be to rewrite it. You must experience this for yourself. Looking for an existential explanation of how you participate within communities, make decisions and share the bond with so many others, those that you will never meet? This is the explanation.
Frank...
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