The Individual and Utopia: A Multidisciplinary Study of Humanity and Perfection

Description

Central to the idea of a perfect society is the idea that communities must be strong and bound together with shared ideologies. However, while this may be true, rarely are the individuals that comprise a community given primacy of place as central to a strong communal theory. This volume moves away from the dominant, current macro-level theorising on the subject of identity and its relationship to and with globalising trends, focusing instead on the individual’s relationship with utopia so as to offer new interpretive approaches for engaging with and examining utopian individuality. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing together work from around the world, The Individual and Utopia enquires after the nature of the utopian as citizen, demonstrating the inherent value of making the individual central to utopian theorizing and highlighting the methodologies necessary for examining the utopian individual. The various approaches employed reveal what it is to be an individual yoked by the idea of citizenship and challenge the ways that we have traditionally been taught to think of the individual as citizen. As such, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social theory, philosophy, literature, cultural studies, architecture, and feminist thought, whose work intersects with political thought, utopian theorizing, or the study of humanity or human nature. Cover Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction PART I Contextualizing the Individual and Utopia 1 The Individual’s Place in Paradise: The Limits, Promise, and Role of Reason in Modern Conceptions of Utopia 2 Fundamental Oppositions: Utopia and the Individual 3 The Individual and the City: Abstract and Concrete 4 “Between the Utopian and the Primitive Horns of His Dilemma”: Aldous Huxley’s Selection of Peter Kropotkin over T.H. Huxley for the Savage’s “Third Alternative” in a Revised Brave New World 5 Owenite Architecture and Urban Rationality: Notes and Reflections on Class and Utopia 6 Mrs Atwood and the Utopian Tradition: A Nineteenth-Century Alchemist as Utopian Theorist PART II Mind, Body, Soul, and the Utopian Individual 7 The Empathetic Turn: The Relationship of Empathy to the Utopian Impulse 8 Solipsism and Utopia: Fredric Brown, Charles Yu, Ludwig Wittgenstein 9 Foucault, Film and the Utopian Body 10 Etherotopia or a Country in the Mind: Bridging the Gap between Utopias and Nirvanas 11 City of God: On the Longing for Architectonic Perfection, a Reminder by Uriel Birnbaum 12 Theosis: Between Personal and Universal Utopia PART III Marginalized and Alternative Interpretations of the Individual and Utopia 13 Eutopias and Dis-Topias: Re-Imagining the Citizen of Ideal Societies 14 Abject Utopianism: On the Silence, Apathy, and Drifting of Psychic Life in Samuel R. Delany’s Hogg 15 The New Mobile Subject: Space, Agency, and Ownership in the Techno-Utopian Age 16 The Philosopher’s Solitude 17 Ubuntu is Utopia: The Individual and the Community in the Work of Nelson Mandela 18 Religion and the Mental Utopia in Literature Index