Download or read book Utopia S Suicide written by John Paul and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2013-12-12 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having one foot in North America and one in Europe, the author inevitably, compares these two continents, their surroundings, their people, and their modus vivendi. The interpretation of happenings on these continents as they relate to one life's adventure is the scope of this work, which is, before everything else, a collage of personal biography, illuminated by flashes of the remarkable historical moments preceding the emigration. There are, moreover, interpretations of impressions colored with romantic, enchanting mysticism, and alternatively, subjective impressions of immigrants who came to America to find a better life and expected, to some extent, to find a promised land on a platter. In either case, impressions are based on predispositions of what immigrants from the old country envisioned American to be like. However, gratia is not a prerequisite; it does not exist in the meaning of emi, nor immi gratia. Is this memoir an unprejudiced evaluation and objective notation of experiences as they were, or a biased overflow of emotions, ridicule and sarcasm, or delight and adornment? What is the difference between autobiography, memoir, and diary, versus a fictitious, rather historical novel in the first place? A degree of deviation from factual reality? A conglomerate relatively dry when transferred onto paper, this cacophony, without regard to categorization, may enlighten the mind of one American, or one potential immigrant, by informing or reforming the picture of the mirage of a once-magical New World or the romanticism of the Old One.
Download or read book Utopia Drive written by Erik Reece and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly
Download or read book A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias written by Angela Jones and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-08-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology is a symposium on queer space and queer utopias. Through the presentation of empirical work by contemporary queer theorists this book aims to create a critical dialogue about the emergence of queer spaces and the ways in which they aim to further queer futurity.
Download or read book Utopias written by Howard P. Segal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This brief history connects the past and present of utopianthought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up topresent day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise. Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about thesocieties who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over thecenturies Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions ofutopia Explores the many forms utopias have taken – propheciesand oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physicalcommunities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspacevisions for the first time The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions ofreform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and ModernizationTheory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recentyears
Download or read book Trans forming Utopia written by Elizabeth Russell and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains 15 essays which are the result of the 7th International Conference of Utopian Studies held in Spain in 2006, either debating the subject, or suggesting alternative readings to some of the theoretical ideas raised within utopian studies.
Download or read book Can we live better 7 classic utopias written by Plato and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 1404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Can we live better? 7 classic utopias” is a collection of the most famous classical works on the topic of an ideal society. For thousands of years human beings have dreamt of perfect worlds, worlds free of conflict, hunger and unhappiness. But can these worlds ever exist in reality? Many thinkers and authors have sought an answer to this question. Utopia is a perfect paradise that doesn’t exist, but which we all dream of anyway. Author Thomas More actually created the noun in one of his books to describe an imaginary island where all systems—political, social, and legal—are perfect and operate harmoniously. The collection includes works by Plato, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Samuel Butler. Contents: Plato - The Republic Thomas More - Utopia Tommaso Campanella - The City of The Sun Frances Bacon - The New Atlantis Edward Bellamy - Looking Backwards: from 2000 to 1887 William Morris - News from Nowhere Samuel Butler - Erewhon
Download or read book Salvation and Suicide written by David Chidester and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2003-10-16 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the first edition: "[This] ambitious and courageous book [is a] benchmark of theology by which questions about the meaningful history of the Peoples Temple may be measured." —Journal of the American Academy of Religion Re-issued in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicides at Jonestown, this revised edition of David Chidester's pathbreaking book features a new prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world. For Chidester, Jonestown recalls the American religious commitment to redemptive sacrifice, which for Jim Jones meant saving his followers from the evils of capitalist society. "Jonestown is ancient history," writes Chidester, but it does provide us with an opportunity "to reflect upon the strangeness of familiar . . . promises of redemption through sacrifice."
Download or read book The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor written by Anson Rabinbach and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor traces the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century notion of digital organisms. Step by step—from Jacques de Vaucanson and his Digesting Duck, through Karl Marx’s Capital, Hermann von Helmholtz’s social thermodynamics, Albert Speer’s Beauty of Labor program in Nazi Germany, and on to the post-Fordist workplace, Rabinbach shows how society, the body, and labor utopias dreamt up future societies and worked to bring them about. This masterful follow-up to The Human Motor, Rabinbach’s brilliant study of the European science of work, bridges intellectual history, labor history, and the history of the body. It shows the intellectual and policy reasons as to how a utopia of the body as motor won wide acceptance and moved beyond the “man as machine” model before tracing its steep decline after 1945—and along with it the eclipse of the great hopes that a more efficient workplace could provide the basis of a new, more socially satisfactory society.
Download or read book Suicide of a Superpower written by Patrick J. Buchanan and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America is disintegrating. The "one Nation under God, indivisible" of the Pledge of Allegiance is passing away. In a few decades, that America will be gone forever. In its place will arise a country unrecognizable to our parents. This is the thrust of Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower, his most controversial and thought-provoking book to date. Buchanan traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America's loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation. And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars. How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what Suicide of a Superpower is all about.
Download or read book Disintegration Bad Love Collective Suicide and the Idols of Imperial Twilight written by Mark P. Worrell and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-02-17 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together again for the first time, Marx and Durkheim join forces in the pages of Disintegration: Bad Love, Collective Suicide, and the Idols of Imperial Twilight for a dialectical exploration of the moral economy of neoliberalism, animated, as it is not only by the capitalist chase for surplus value, but also by an immortal vortex of sacred powers. Classical sociology and psychoanalysis are reconstituted within Hegelian social ontology and dialectical method that differentiates between the ephemeral and free and the eternal and fixed aspects of modern life.
Download or read book Utopias and the Environment written by Geoffrey Berry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopias and the Environment explores the way in which the kind of ‘dreaming’, or re-visioning, known as the ‘utopian imaginary’ takes environmental concerns into account. This kind of creative intervention is increasingly important in an era of ecological crisis, as we witness the failure of governments worldwide to significantly change industrial civilization from a path of ‘business as usual.’ In this context, it is up to the artists – in this case authors – to imagine new ways of being that respond to this imperative and immediate global issue. Concurrently, it is also up to critics, readers, and thinkers everywhere to appraise these narratives of possibility for their complexities and internal conflicts, as well as for their promise, as we enter this new era of rapid change and adaptation. Because creative and critical thinkers must work together towards this goal, the idea of the critical utopia, coined by Tom Moylan in response to the fiction of the 1970s, is now ingrained in the common argot and is one of the key ideas discussed in this book. This development in the genre, which combines self-reflexivity and multiple perspectives within its dreaming, represents the postmodern spirit in its most regenerative aspect. This book is testament to such hopes and potential realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Green Letters.
Download or read book Utopias of One written by Joshua Kotin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopias fail. Utopias of one do not. They are perfect worlds. Yet their success comes at a cost. They are radically singular—and thus exclusive and inimitable. Utopias of One is a major new account of utopian writing. Joshua Kotin examines how eight writers—Henry David Thoreau, W. E. B. Du Bois, Osip and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam, Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and J. H. Prynne—construct utopias of one within and against modernity’s two large-scale attempts to harmonize individual and collective interests: liberalism and communism. The book begins in the United States between the buildup to the Civil War and the end of Jim Crow; continues in the Soviet Union between Stalinism and the late Soviet period; and concludes in England and the United States between World War I and the end of the Cold War. The book, in this way, captures how writers from disparate geopolitical contexts resist state and normative power to construct perfect worlds—for themselves alone. Utopias of One makes a vital contribution to debates about literature and politics, presenting innovative arguments about aesthetic difficulty, personal autonomy, and complicity and dissent. The book also models a new approach to transnational and comparative scholarship, combining original research in English and Russian to illuminate more than a century and a half of literary and political history.
Download or read book Utopias in Nonfiction Film written by Simon Spiegel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Comprehensive and thorough, Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new direction in its surprise application to documentary that has the potential to shake up the field.'- Jane Gaines, Columbia University, USA 'Spiegel has introduced a new sub-genre to utopian studies, the documentary film. The book covers an impressive range of films, making the book one of the few truly international and comparative works in utopian studies.'- Lyman Tower Sargent, University of Missouri-St. Louis, USA "Simon Spiegel’s magisterial overview of utopian documentaries and nonfiction films is a treasure trove of information and unearths many forgotten and half-forgotten films, providing perceptive discussions of sidelined movies that deserve his (and our) critical scrutiny.“ - Eckart Voigts, University of Braunschweig – Institute of Technology, Germany This book is the first major study on utopias in nonfiction film. Since the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia more than 500 years ago, countless books have been written which describe a better world. But in film, positive utopias seem to be nonexistent. So far, research has focused almost exclusively on dystopias, since positive outlooks seem to run contrary to the media’s requirement. Utopias in Nonfiction Film takes a new approach; starting from the insight that literary utopias are first and foremost meant as a reaction to the ills of the present and not as entertaining stories, it looks at documentary and propaganda films, an area which so far has been completely ignored by research. Combining insights from documentary research and utopian studies, a vast and very diverse corpus of films is analysed. Among them are Zionist propaganda films, cinematic city utopias, socialist films of the future as well as web videos produced by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS.
Download or read book The Ethics of Suicide written by M. Pabst Battin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is suicide wrong, profoundly morally wrong? Almost always wrong, but excusable in a few cases? Sometimes morally permissible? Imprudent, but not wrong? Is it sick, a matter of mental illness? Is it a private matter or a largely social one? Could it sometimes be right, or a "noble duty," or even a fundamental human right? Whether it is called "suicide" or not, what role may a person play in the end of his or her own life? This collection of primary sources--the principal texts of ethical interest from major writers in western and nonwestern cultures, from the principal religious traditions, and from oral cultures where observer reports of traditional practices are available, spanning Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania, the Arctic, and North and South America--facilitates exploration of many controversial practical issues: physician-assisted suicide or aid-in-dying; suicide in social or political protest; self-sacrifice and martyrdom; suicides of honor or loyalty; religious and ritual practices that lead to death, including sati or widow-burning, hara-kiri, and sallekhana, or fasting unto death; and suicide bombings, kamikaze missions, jihad, and other tactical and military suicides. This collection has no interest in taking sides in controversies about the ethics of suicide; rather, rather, it serves to expand the character of these debates, by showing them to be multi-dimensional, a complex and vital part of human ethical thought.
Download or read book American Utopia written by Peter Swirski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Black Tuesday to the White House, from Plato to Robert Nozick, from Eugene Debs to Richard Nixon, from Peter Cornelis Plockhoy to the hippie communes of the Sixties, from universal basic income to utopian basic income, from proverbial wisdom to multilevel selection, from Big Data to paleomorality, from Prisoner’s Dilemma to social-engineering Israeli kindergartens, from time travel to gene engineering, from the pretzel logic of meritocracy to deaggressing humanity, American Utopia maps the pitfalls and windfalls of social reform in the name of the human use of human beings. Interrogating the assumptions behind four outré utopias by Thomas M. Disch, Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Margaret Atwood, the book interrogates the assumptions that have historically been central to the utopian project. Whence the seeds of social discontent? Whence our taste for egoism and altruism? For waging war and waging peace? Can we bioengineer human nature to specifications? Should we? Who makes better guardians: humans or machines? And who will guard the guardians?
Download or read book Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions written by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines feminist speculative fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and finds within it a new vision for the future. Rejecting notions of postmodern utopia as exclusionary, Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor advances one defined in terms of hospitality, casting what she calls 'imaginative sympathy' as the foundation of utopian desire. Tracing these themes through the works of Atwood, Butler, Lessing and Winterson, as well as those of well-known Muslim feminists such as El Saadawi, Parsipur and Mernissi, Wagner-Lawlor balances literary analysis with innovative extensions of feminist philosophy to show how inclusionary utopian thinking can inform and promote political agency. Examining these contemporary fictions reveals the rewards of attending to a community that acknowledges difference, diversity and the imaginative potential of every human being.
Download or read book Famous Utopias written by and published by . This book was released on 1901 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
