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AUTHOR: |
PETER FITTING |
TITLE: |
The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson |
SOURCE: |
Utopian Studies 9 no2 8-17 '98 |
The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.
"The world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality."
-- Marx, Letter to Ruge, September, 1843, cited in Jameson 1994a: 75
ONE MANIFESTATION of the collapse of the consensus in American politics in the nineteen-sixties was the revival of utopian writing, which took place primarily within the generic boundaries of science fiction;(FN1) while, on another level, there was a parallel development in theoretical writing, prompted by the growing discovery of the writing of the Frankfurt School (and in particular in this context of the work of Herbert Marcuse, then living in the US and whose 1955 Eros and Civilization can be seen as one as the first major theoretical text of the utopian revival). In the following I review Fredric Jameson's engagement with these literary developments and the concept of utopia as it has evolved over the past twenty-six years, from the perspective of someone who writes about literary utopias and science fiction.(FN2)
Jameson's first contribution to the development of utopian studies follows from his presentation of "dialectical thinking" in Marxism and Form (1971) with its influential discussion of Bloch and Marcuse, and his defence of the timeliness of the utopian impulse:
For where in the older society (as in Marx's classic analysis) Utopian thought represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfilments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power of that system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image. The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is. (1971: 110-111)
In the 1960s, utopian writing in North America found a home in science fiction, a genre better suited to the task of imagining "a world qualitatively distinct from this one" than was the realism of mainstream fiction. The enlargement of science fiction, from hardware and adventure to social concerns began with the critique of the status quo and soon turned to more explicit "thought experiments." While there was science fiction which presented a critique of capitalism or of the US intervention in Vietnam, the most important new thematic area followed the fault line of gender. Ursula K. Le Guin's celebrated science fiction novel dealing with sex and gender, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)--was followed by a series of science fiction utopias in the 1970s: beginning with her own The Dispossessed (1974), Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975), Samuel Delany's Triton (1976) and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)--to name only a few of the best known of these works.(FN3)
Jameson was well aware of these popular utopian novels, and in 1975 he wrote about Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness ("World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative"). A few years later he used the occasion of an essay on Louis Marin's book on utopia (Utopiques: Jeux d'espace) to introduce Le Guin's The Dispossessed to a more theoretically inclined audience which was not so well acquainted with science fiction ("Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse" 1977). Then, in a continuing extension of Bloch's recovery of the utopian impulses at work in mass cultural phenomena, he further elaborated the idea of a dialectic between ideology and utopia. His article "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture" (1979) explored this dialectic in terms of popular culture; and then, in The Political Unconscious (1981), he extended this concept, explaining that "all class consciousness--or in other words, all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes--is in its very nature Utopian" (1981: 289).
Jameson's presentation and reworking of the concept of the utopian impulse has had a tremendous influence on literary studies in North America, particularly as a way of dealing with popular culture from a Marxist perspective, for it avoided the extremes of straightforward enthusiasm as well as that of disdain for popular culture as mere commodification and manipulation. Yet the impact of his ideas on utopian studies has been mixed since the recognition that there is a utopian dimension in all cultural manifestations has sometimes led critics to confuse the utopian impulse with the literary utopia and to claim a variety of unrelated works as literary utopias, leading to an unhelpful inflation of our field of study.
From the perspective of those of us who work on and write about utopian fiction, Jameson's most fruitful and troubling intervention lies elsewhere, in his proposal that the literary utopia should not be seen as the representation of an ideal society, but as a reflection on "our own incapacity to conceive [utopia] in the first place" (1975: 230). This argument, first advanced in the conclusion of his article on Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1975), was fully elaborated in his 1977 analysis of Marin's Utopiques, and again in the 1982 article "Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future," in which he discussed the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. There he wrote that our "constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself, [is not due] to any individual failure of imagination but is the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners." (1982: 153) Instead of a mode of representation, then, the literary utopia is "a determinate type of praxis" (1977: 6), whose first operation is the "neutralization" of the real: "In the case of the Utopian narrative, the place of the Real--of that which must first be constituted within the work before it can be dissolved or 'neutralized' by the work as process--may be identified by the obsessive references to actuality which seem part of the conventions of such texts ..." (1977: 10).
Thus, in his discussion of Le Guin's The Dispossessed, for instance (and I am taking my examples from other critics writing about the novel), instead of writing about Le Guin's use of Bakunin or the feasibility of the Anneresti system for assigning work, instead of critiquing the sexual politics demonstrated in Shevek's monogamous, heterosexual relationship with Takver, Jameson argues that
it is only in terms of a more conventionally novelistic and more properly representational standard of literature that [The Dispossessed] can be reproached for the poverty of its political concepts and the naivete of its view of present-day world history; if on the contrary we adopt Marin's view of the utopian as process and production, we will see that it is precisely such stereotypicality, and the conventionality of Le Guin's own liberalism, which constitute the raw material upon which her Utopian praxis must do its work of transformation. (1977: 8)
In this way, if we refer to the familiar definitions of the literary utopia as containing both the critique of the author's existing society as well as a model for a better one (e.g. Suvin: 54), "neutralization," in Jameson's dynamic terms, may be seen as an analogue to the idea of critique or negation. This dynamic critique
has less to do with the construction and perfection of someone's "idea" of a "perfect society" than it does with a concrete set of mental operations to be performed on a determinate type of raw material given in advance, which is contemporary society itself--or what amounts to the same thing, on those collective representations of contemporary society that inform our ideologies just as they order our experience of daily life. (1977: 6)
For the critic, then, it is not (only) a question of identifying these "mental operations," but the "collective representations," and more specifically--and in familiar Jamesonian terms--of uncovering the buried and repressed contradictions which it is the text's function to "resolve" or "neutralize." In reference to Xenakis's project for a "cosmic vertical city," for instance, Jameson asks what purpose this vision serves, and then turns to our contradictory feelings about the city itself:
Our point of departure for such a reconstruction is the nature of Xenakis' U-topia itself, the fundamental features of that ultimate not-place or non-place which he invented to neutralize the contradictions of contemporary thinking about the city. We must therefore try to reorganize the latter in such a way as to articulate our own ideology of the city, our own fuzzy stereotypes and fantasies, into a system of determinate antinomies and aporias into which the thought of the Western city-dweller about his city can be seen to be locked. (1977: 12)
As I said above, for those of us interested in literary utopias, Jameson's arguments are provocative. Despite Jameson's contention that literary utopias are a "type of praxis" rather than a "mode of representation," they nonetheless continue to be read and understood as if they were meant to be taken literally, as designs for, or at least images of, a better society. In making his argument Jameson examines several of the most significant works of the utopian revival of the 1970s, which do include textual reservations about their own representability (for this see Tom Moylan's discussion of the "critical utopia" in his book, Demand the Impossible), but these works are only a few of the many utopian novels published in that period, whose writers, readers and critics have continued to use representational categories to understand and discuss them.(FN4)
Reading fictional utopias literally has a long history, as can be seen in the most famous American utopia--Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888)--which had a immediate practical effect: the launching of a national political movement. Within months of the book's publication the first Nationalist Club was founded to propagate Bellamy's ideas (as expounded in Looking Backward). "By February 1891 there were 165 Nationalist Clubs spread across 27 states of the Union, together with a host of more informal Bellamy clubs ..." (Kumar 136). These clubs played an important role in the founding of the People's Party and in the 1892 presidential elections.
Already in Marxism and Form Jameson had written that:
when the literary work attempts to use this Utopian material directly, as content, in secular fashion, as in the various literary Utopias themselves, there results an impoverishment which is due to the reduction of the multiple levels of the Utopian idea to the single, relatively abstract field of social planning. (1971: 145-146)
Impoverishment and misreadings perhaps, but readings nonetheless, which many authors feel was the whole purpose of the exercise in the first place. There have been suggestions for distinguishing utopian novels from properly literal schemes for social transformation as a way of resolving this problem, but to do so we would have to ignore not only the impact of Bellamy's novel, but the mixing of genres within many literary utopias as well, like--for instance--the Constitution appended to H.L. Hunt's Alpaca Revisited (1967--a book which also includes an appendix composed of the mostly pro forma replies of various "Heads of Foreign Nations" to whom Hunt had sent copies of his model constitution). Going in the opposite direction in this blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction, there is the example of the utopian dream which André Gorz appended to his 1988 essay Farewell to the Working Class.
Other critics have argued that the utopian novels of the 1970s moved beyond such literalism, yet as the dates of these last examples suggest, recent utopian writing has not abandoned representation. For every 1970s utopian novel which includes an acknowledgment of the dilemma of representation, as in Le Guin's subtitling The Dispossessed an "ambiguous utopia," there are as many blueprints, of which the most famous would be Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) and its 1981 "prequel" Ecotopia Emerging which, by attempting to explain how the utopian society came about, does then dissolve back into the real as political strategy replaces utopian vision.(FN5)
By some accounts, this discussion is no longer moot since--like other developments in the 1960s--the high point of the flowering of literary utopias seems to have waned. Yet utopian fiction does continue to appear, while in Jameson's case there has been a shift or widening of focus in his attention to the manifestations of the utopian. In his 1988 "Utopianism after the end of Utopia" (written as part of a catalogue for an exhibition of "recent sculpture and photography"), Jameson acknowledges this shift when he writes that the utopianism of the literary visions of the 1970s now manifests itself in a very different way, as part of what he sees as the "spatial turn" of postmodernism: "the development of a whole range of properly spatial Utopias in which the transformation of social relations and political institutions is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the human body" (1991: 160)
In Jameson's own writing, then, references to the utopian have not diminished, although the cultural artifacts he studies have changed. In the preface to the Postmodernism book, for instance, he identifies Utopia as one of the "four themes" of the book: "Utopian representations knew an extraordinary revival in the 1960s. If postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all" (1991: xvi).
Even as his interests have widened, Jameson has continued to seek out literary utopias, as in his lengthy analysis of Platonov's "peasant utopia" Chevengur in Seeds of Time ("Utopia, Modernism and Death," 1994a: 73-128). As he points out, this belated attention is linked to the novel's publishing history, for although it was written in the 1920s, it was only published recently, emerging "in the last fifteen years ... as though only just written down" (1994a: 78). In the same year, he turned his attention to one of the classical writers of the utopian canon, Charles Fourier ("Ontology and Utopia") which did not deal directly with the nature of the literary utopia, but offered an evaluation of Fourier's "ontological vision," and of his unique observations on group dynamics, an area of investigation which is, as Jameson argues, central to any transformative project and yet has been mostly ignored by political theorists (he discusses two important recent exceptions in the work of Sartre and of Laclau and Mouffe). While this leads to a fascinating discussion of Fourier's three "distributive" or "mechanizing" passions, it is not really relevant to the issues I have raised concerning the literary utopia.
In a forthcoming article on the Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson,(FN6) Jameson turns again to the contemporary literary utopia. While this is not the place for a full discussion of this sprawling (and prize-winning) SF trilogy, it is important to note that Robinson's work is already a step beyond the critical utopias of the 1970s. Just as those works were described as moving beyond the presentation of the utopian society as a no-place of static perfection (as in Bellamy, or even in Callenbach's Ecotopia), so Robinson's novels move beyond that utopian model. Those "critical utopias" of the 1970s used narrative strategies which called into question the work's own utopian status, ending (as did Morris's News From Nowhere), with the warning that the utopian society will only come about if the reader becomes involved (as in Piercy's Woman on The Edge of Time or in Russ's The Female Man), or through the depiction of a utopia in crisis because it has stagnated and needs to be renewed (as in The Dispossessed). Yet however much they included a critique of utopia, they nonetheless shared a common vision of the values they were trying to achieve and maintain. The Mars trilogy, on the other hand, is built on restaging those very debates and discussions about what the new society should be; Robinson brings to the familiar plot of the colonization of Mars a whole range of utopian questions, an ongoing discussion elaborated in great and wonderful detail about what this new world could and should be. It is not so much that utopia has receded--although that might be a way of visualizing what is new about Robinson's work--but that the author sets his utopia at an earlier stage in the familiar transition to the utopian society, the moment when change is coming, when all the discussions not only about how, but what the new society will be, are still open. It is as if--even as our utopian hopes have receded, or passed behind a cloud--SF remains today, at "the end of history" (like Judith Merril's statement about SF being the only place one could write political fiction during the 50s),(FN7) the only place where the discussions about the possibility of an alternative society could be argued. As Jameson puts it in his discussion of the Mars trilogy:
[W]e do want to be able to think about "real" politics here and not merely about its convincing or unconvincing "representation" in these episodes, which dramatize our ideological objections and resistances to utopia fully as much as they satisfy our impulses towards it. Unlike the "monological" Utopias of the tradition, which needed to dramatize a single Utopian possibility strongly because of its repression from Terran history and political possibility, this more "dialogical" one includes the struggle between a whole range of Utopian alternatives, about which it deliberately fails to conclude. (27)
This receding of the utopian moment--as manifest in the temper of the times, and in the sense of the passing of a particular utopian moment (which we thought of as the 1960s)--is marked by a scaling back of the utopian visions of most of the writers of the 70s utopias (with the exception of Piercy's 1991 He, She and It; U.K. as The Body of Glass). Although Robinson had written a more traditional utopia,(FN8) here, in moving beyond the critical utopias of the 1970s, it is as if his novels were written as an illustration of Jameson's own statements about the impossibility of imagining utopia, (and it is perhaps relevant to mention that Robinson is a former student of Jameson's), a point which he reiterates in the conclusion of his article on Robinson: "And it is also a structural presupposition of this Utopia, since we do not even witness its evolution as a narrative event: perhaps indeed we could not do so. Yet Utopia as a form is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the imperative to imagine them" (36).
So where does this leave us? In a situation akin to that Jameson refers to as that of the utopia's effect on us, "in which the mind is [brought] up short before its own ideological limits, in a stunned and puzzled arrest of thought before the double bind in which it suddenly finds itself paralysed" (1977: 12) My double bind stems from the recognition, on the one hand, that by accepting his arguments about the "true vocation" of the utopia, thereby abandoning the consideration of the utopia in terms of its ability to portray an alternative, we are apparently left with only its critical and negative dimension. This certainly helps us to understand the "conditions of possibility" of a specific utopian work, and the buried contradictions it is attempting to resolve, but it does not satisfactorily acknowledge the positive aspects which brought us to utopias in the first place. For many of us became interested in literary utopias precisely insofar as they were visions of alternatives.
In a 1983 talk Jameson introduced the notion of "cognitive mapping" which I would use to argue for the relevance of the literary utopia to this continuing attempt to find ways of imagining an alternative:
[There is] not a crisis in Marxist science [today, but] in Marxist ideology. If ideology ... is a vision of the future that grips the masses, we have to admit that, save in a few ongoing collective experiments ... no Marxist or Socialist party or movement anywhere has the slightest conception of what socialism or communism as a social system ought to be and can be expected to look like. That vision will not be purely economic.... It is, as well, supremely social and cultural, involving the task of trying to imagine how a society without hierarchy, a society of free people, a society that has at once repudiated the economic mechanisms of the market, can possibly cohere. (1988: 355)
In one sense, the dilemma I am describing is analogous to the dilemma facing any politicized approach to literature or art, in which the activist asks the theoretician if, beyond investigation and analysis, there is not some place for the prescriptive, and in that sense, I can't help wondering if it is not still useful to acknowledge the role that utopian representation plays in the imagining of an alternative.
If the utopia is to be considered as a form of praxis, it must be one which like the often cited bust of Apollo in Rilke's sonnet, will force us to acknowledge that "you must change your life."(FN9) Yet this is the crux of the dilemma, for the specificity of the literary utopia lies not in some ideal of beauty which reminds us of the insufficiency of our own lives, not in its ability to express the utopian impulse, to "figure" in some metaphorical way "the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopia or classless society" (1981: 291), nor even to negate or neutralize ideological contradictions, although the literary utopia may also do all of these things. Many of us still think that the special task of the utopia--and I am thinking precisely of the revival of the 1970s--was to reach a different audience with images of, with the look and feel and shape and experiences of what an alternative might and could actually be, a thought experiment or form of "social dreaming" (Sargent: 3) which gave us a sense of how our lives could be different and better, not only in our immediate material conditions, but in the sense of an entire world or social system.
Yet those utopias are no longer being written, and few would dispute the link between utopian writing--or its absence--and the larger social and political context in which we now live. I have perhaps mistakenly given the impression that in Jameson's analysis of works like Robinson's Mars trilogy there is no place for the actual discussion of the work's utopian features. Rather, in his typical dialectical manner, Jameson moves between generic considerations (e.g. the consideration of the relationship of science fiction and utopia, or of the possibility of Utopias today), and a description of the properly utopian (and dystopian) elements in Robinson's work:
[The Utopian text] is not supposed to produce this synthesis all by itself, or to represent it: that is a matter for human history and for collective praxis. It is supposed only to produce the requirement of the synthesis, to open the space into which it is to be imagined. And this is the spirit in which the various political "solutions" of the Mars trilogy are also to be evaluated: that they are numerous, and contradictory or even irreconcilable, is I believe an advantage and an achievement in a contemporary Utopia, which must also, as Darko Suvin has pointed out, stage an implicit debate with the objections and ideological and political prejudices of its readers. (26)
I cannot resolve this dilemma, even for myself. Yet, at a time when the utopian seems to have receded it remains essential that we follow Jameson's call to understand "the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners" (1982: 153), a closure which prevents us from imagining much less attaining that better society of which we dream. In the Platonov essay he describes what I might call a possible "pre-utopian" project as follows:
This first moment of destruction and seeping away, then--what I have elsewhere called the moment of "world reduction" in Utopian discourse--will then be followed by a process that it would be too simple and misleading to call reconstruction or Utopian construction, since in effect it involves the very effort to find a way to begin imagining Utopia to being with. Perhaps in a more Western kind of psychoanalytic language--with specific reference to the origins of Freudianism in hysteria--we might think of the new onset of the Utopian process as a kind of desiring to desire, a learning to desire, the invention of the desire called Utopia in the first place, along with new rules for the fantasizing or daydreaming of such a thing--a set of narrative protocols with no precedent in our previous literary institutions ... (1994a: 90)
ADDED MATERIAL
FOOTNOTES
1. See for instance Darko Suvin's explanation that "Strictly and precisely speaking, utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction. Paradoxically, it can be seen as such only now that SF has expanded into its modern phase, 'looking backward' from its englobing of utopia" (Suvin 61). See also Moylan, passim.
For the larger politcal context, see Jameson's own historical account of these developments in "Periodizing the 60s."
2. Although there have been references to the significance of this concept in Jameson's work, there has not been a systematic discussion of it until this special issue of Utopian Studies. In the Jameson issue of Critical Exchange, for instance, some of the essays briefly discuss the concept, particularly in the context of the final chapter of The Political Unconscious. The most extended such discussion is not an appraisal per se, but John Beverly's very productive attempt to apply those insights to the development of poetry during the Spanish Golden Age ("The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia in Spanish Golden Age Poetry.") Similarly, the articles in Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique sometimes refer in passing to the concept of utopia in his work, but without any sustained discussion.
In The Jamesonian Unconscious Clint Burnham writes that "Jameson's theory of utopia has three sources/implications: the positive and negative resonances in Marxist discourse; its secular label of artistic 'content'; and its theologico-formal metaphysics" (57). As the quotation suggests, Burnham's approach is rather different from my own, and these insightful few pages (55-69) are part of a much more complex attempt to write what he describes as "an objectivation of theory via the work of Fredric Jameson" (xiv), rather than an examination of the concept of utopia.
3. For discussion of the development of science fiction in these terms, see my own "The Modern Anglo-American SF novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation." For a discussion of the major works of this utopian revival, see my "'So We All Became Mothers': New Roles for Men in Recent Utopian Fiction"; and Tom Moylan Demand The Impossible.
4. For a series of articles which use representational categories to discuss literary utopias, see the essays in Ruby Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds. Women in Search of Utopia.
In Demand the Future Moylan writes that the critical utopias of the 1970s should not be seen as "blueprints or plans to be imposed by one author or by a central authority; rather they are a diverse series of preconceptual images which express the realms behind that political activity and anticipate the social alternatives that many are still working for" (198, my italics). Moylan takes the expression "preconceptual images" from Sheila Rowbothan (in Beyond the Fragments) where she wrote of the need "to make the creation of prefigurative forms an explicit part of our movement against capitalism" (cited in Moylan, 196).
5. Another well-known example is the Susan Haden Elgin's novel Native Tongue (1984) in which she describes fictionally her ongoing project for designing a utopian language which would then enable and produce a utopian society. See the Laadan web-site at www.interlog.com/?kms/laadan/for a fuller explanation of this utopian project.
6. The Mars trilogy consists of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1995).
7. "The most important secondary effect of the Bomb was not felt until the height of the McCarthy era, when science fiction became, for a time, virtually the only vehicle of political dissent ..." (74), in "What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?"
8. Again a part of a trilogy, all set in Orange County, California, and portraying a series of alternative, post collapse futures, of which only the last, Pacific Shore (1990) is a utopia. The other two more dystopian works are: The Wild Shore (1984) and The Gold Coast (1988).
9. When confronted with the headless statue of Apollo, the poet is driven to conclude (in the final stanzas) that even so "his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power," that if the statue were complete it would not have the same impact: "for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life" ("Archaic Torso of Apollo").
FREDRIC JAMESON: PRINCIPAL TEXTS ON UTOPIA
1971 Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP.
1975 World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative. Science-Fiction Studies 7 (November 1975): 221-230.
1976 Introduction/Prospectus: To Reconsider the Relationship of Marxism to Utopian Thought. Minnesota Review (Spring 1976): 53-58.
1977 Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse. Diacritics 7:2 (Summer 1977): 2-21.
1979 Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture. Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130-148.
1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP.
1982 Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future. Science-Fiction Studies 27 (9:2 July 1982): 147-158.
1984 "Periodizing the 60s" (rptd. in The Ideologies of Theory, vol 2 "The Syntax of History." Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988: 75-102.)
1988a Cognitive Mapping. In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 347-357.
1988b Utopianism after the end of Utopia. (in 1991, chap 6: 154-180; 424-425).
1991 Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP.
1994a The Seeds of Time. NY: Columbia UP.
1994b Ontology and Utopia. l'esprit créateur XXXIV, 4 (Winter 1994): 46-64.
1998 "If I find one good city I will spare the man": Realism and Utopia in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Forthcoming in Estrangement and Cognition in Science Fiction and Utopian Literature, ed. Patrick Parrinder, Liverpool UP.
REFERENCES
Beverly, John. "The Dialectic of Ideology and Utopia in Spanish Golden Age Poetry." Critical Exchange "Jameson Issue" #14: Fall 1983: 102-123.
Burnham, Clint. The Jamesonian Unconscious. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Fitting, Peter. "The Modern Anglo-American SF novel: Utopian Longing and Capitalist Cooptation," Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1979: 59-76).
Fitting, Peter. "'So We All Became Mothers': New Roles for Men in Recent Utopian Fiction," Science-Fiction Studies 12 (1985: 156-183).
Kellner, Douglas, ed. Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique. Washington DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopian and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.
Merril, Judith. "What Do You Mean: Science? Fiction?" in Thomas Clareson ed. SF: The Other Side of Realism. Bowling Green: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1971: 53-95.
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science fiction and the utopian imagination. NY: Methuen, 1986.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. NY: Random House, 1982.
Rohrlich, Ruby and Elaine Hoffman Baruch, eds. Women in Search of Utopia. NY: Schocken, 1984.
Sargent, Lyman Tower. The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited. Utopian Studies 5, 1 (1994): 1-37.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
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