Download or read book Utopian Dreams written by Tobias Jones and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012-10-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopian Dreams offers one writer's attempt to retreat from the 'real world' - which is making him emptier and angrier by the day - and seek out the alternatives to modern manners and morality. Instead of cynicism, loneliness and depression, is it possible to be idealistic, to find belonging and companionship with others who share your sadness, or even, perhaps, your happiness? With his wife and baby in tow, Jones spends a year with spritualists, time-travellers, reformed drug addicts and Quakers, producing a fascinating exploration of the meaning of community.
Download or read book Welcome to Utopia written by Alan Atkinson and published by Utopian Dreams. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia City.Rebuilt from the ashes of America's most horrific terror attack and transformed into a paragon of technological advancement, this city stands as a beacon of possibility where almost anything can happen.Jericho Hansen certainly hopes so; as a gay superhero in the deep South, his ambition is to achieve lifelong recognition by joining Force Majeure, America's best-known superhero team. But to do that, he must first travel to Utopia and learn the hard way if he's got what it takes. The events that transpire when he gets there will turn his entire world upside down. He will experience love and loss, triumph and tragedy. Mysteries will be solved and fresh inquiries opened.Welcome to Utopia, where the most important lesson is that nothing is truly as it seems.
Download or read book Utopian Dreams Apocalyptic Nightmares written by Miguel López-Lozano and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares traces the history of utopian representations of the Americas, first on the part of the colonizers, who idealized the New World as an earthly paradise, and later by Latin American modernizing elites, who imagined Western industrialization, cosmopolitanism and consumption as a utopian dream for their independent societies. Carlos Fuentes, Homero Aridjis, Carmen Boullosa, and Alejandro Morales utilize the literary genre of dystopian science fiction to elaborate on how globalization has resulted in the alienation of indigenous peoples and the deterioration of the ecology. This book concludes that Mexican and Chicano perspectives on the past and the future of their societies constitute a key site for the analysis of the problems of underdevelopment, social injustice, and ecological decay that plague today's world. Whereas utopian discourse was once used to justify colonization, Mexican and Chicano writers now deploy dystopian rhetoric to interrogate projects of modernization, contributing to the current debate on the global expansion of capitalism. The narratives coincide in expressing confidence in the ability of Latin American and U.S. Latino popular sectors to claim a decisive role in the implementation of enhanced measures to guarantee an ecologically sound, ethnically diverse, and just society for the future of the Americas.
Download or read book Revolutionary Dreams written by Richard Stites and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1991-11-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The revolutionary ideals of equality, communal living, proletarian morality, and technology worship, rooted in Russian utopianism, generated a range of social experiments which found expression, in the first decade of the Russian revolution, in festival, symbol, science fiction, city planning, and the arts. In this study, historian Richard Stites offers a vivid portrayal of revolutionary life and the cultural factors--myth, ritual, cult, and symbol--that sustained it, and describes the principal forms of utopian thinking and experimental impulse. Analyzing the inevitable clash between the authoritarian elements in the Bolshevik's vision and the libertarian behavior and aspirations of large segments of the population, Stites interprets the pathos of utopian fantasy as the key to the emotional force of the Bolshevik revolution which gave way in the early 1930s to bureaucratic state centralism and a theology of Stalinism.
Download or read book Utopian Dreams written by John Hoel and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2008-10 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Utopian Dreams, a young research scientist works on an I.Q. enhancing drug and tries it on himself. He ends up destroying the human race and beginning again hundreds of years later as he clones his aging, almost dead, cyborg body. Other stories in this book include subjects of romance, mystery, adventure, science fiction and fantasy. Written with a wide audience in mind, the author John Hoel, is at his best writing short stories. He resides in a log cabin by a pond nestled in the Ocooch Mountains of southwestern Wisconsin and writes every day.
Download or read book Dreams of Peace and Freedom written by Jay Winter and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Reality of Dreams written by Japhy Wilson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of radical megaprojects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, considering the fate of utopian fantasies under conditions of global capitalism From 2007 to 2017, the “Citizens’ Revolution” launched an ambitious series of post-neoliberal megaprojects in the remote Amazonian region of Ecuador, including an interoceanic transport corridor, a world-leading biotechnology university, and a planned network of two hundred “Millennium Cities.” The aim was to liberate the nation from its ecologically catastrophic dependence on Amazonian oil reserves, while transforming its jungle region from a wild neoliberal frontier into a brave new world of “twenty-first-century socialism.” This book documents the heroic scale of this endeavor, the surreal extent of its failure, and the paradoxical process through which it ended up reinforcing the economic model that it had been designed to overcome. It explores the phantasmatic and absurd dimensions of the transformation of social reality under conditions of global capitalism, deconstructing the utopian fantasies of the state, and drawing attention to the eruption of insurgent utopias staged by those with nothing left to lose.
Download or read book Dealing in Dreams written by Lilliam Rivera and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A novel exploration of societal roles, gender, and equality.” —School Library Journal (starred review) The Outsiders meets Mad Max: Fury Road in this “daring and dramatic” (Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling) dystopian novel about sisterhood and the cruel choices people are forced to make in order to survive. At night, Las Mal Criadas own these streets. Sixteen-year-old Nalah leads the fiercest all-girl crew in Mega City. That role brings with it violent throwdowns and access to the hottest boydega clubs, but Nala quickly grows weary of her questionable lifestyle. Her dream is to get off the streets and make a home in the exclusive Mega Towers, in which only a chosen few get to live. To make it to the Mega Towers, Nalah must prove her loyalty to the city’s benevolent founder and cross the border in a search of the mysterious gang the Ashé Riders. Led by a reluctant guide, Nalah battles crews and her own doubts but the closer she gets to her goal the more she loses sight of everything—and everyone—she cares about. Nalah must choose whether or not she’s willing to do the unspeakable to get what she wants. Can she discover that home is not where you live but whom you chose to protect before she loses the family she’s created for good?
Download or read book Utopia Drive written by Erik Reece and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 272 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 Sabotaged written by James Pratt and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alongside the various people moving into and through the nineteenth-century Texas frontier was a group of European intellectuals bent on establishing a socialist utopia near the hamlet of Dallas. Their inspiration, French philosopher Charles Fourier, envisioned a society in which basic human ambitions would be expressed and cultivated, tied together by the bonds of emotion. Fourier’s self-appointed disciple Victor Considerant led the establishment of La Réunion in 1855, organized under a Paris stock company. James Pratt weaves together the dramatic story of this utopia: the complex tale of a diverse group of Europeans who sought a new society but were forced to face the realities of life in nineteenth-century Texas. Considerant’s followers endured a long ocean voyage with Spanish gunboats following in their Caribbean wake. They brushed blooming magnolias through Buffalo Bayou between Galveston Bay and Houston—so narrow a channel that two ships could not pass simultaneously. They walked for three weeks across barren country, came into conflict with the Texas legislature over land, and had to buy their stolen horses back from Chief Ned, a famous Delaware Indian living in Texas. They were buffeted in the rising political winds of abolition, and droughts ruined their crops. In the end, however, it was their flamboyant leader Victor Considerant who sabotaged their dream.
Download or read book Utopian Images and Narratives in Advertising written by Luigi Manca and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-05-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of advertising and its treatment of utopian appeal enhance our understanding of consumer culture. By looking into the advertising page, we also look into consumers’ desires and the process by which these desires are reshaped and rechanneled through images and narratives created solely for the purpose of making a sale. Utopian Images and Narratives in Advertising: Dreams for Sale, edited by Luigi Manca, Alessandra Manca, and Gail W. Pieper, is a collection of essays which gather a host of academicians from a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, psychology, literature, fine arts, history, religious studies, communication, and media studies. Through their expansive disciplinary expertise, the contributors bring unique insights to the analysis of the advertising page. The collection’s cross-disciplinary investigation also examines gender images and narratives which, in the advertising page, are frequently associated with utopian fantasies. The analyses offered in Utopian Images and Narratives in Advertising will appeal to any scholar or student engaged in mass media, communication, and the effect of advertising and consumerism on individuals and cultures.
Download or read book Intellectuals Utopian Dreams and the Question of Human Rights in China written by Mab Huang and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together 13 papers published by the author over the past 50 years, arranged chronologically, so the reader can follow the unfolding development of the author’s thinking on the issues discussed here. The essays primarily investigate the role intellectuals in the dramatic changes in China since the fall of the old imperial order, with an emphasis on the tension between the urge towards utopian dreams and the quest for human rights and democracy. The earlier pieces are two chapters from the author’s 1969 Columbia University PhD dissertation dealing with the Chinese Communist Party leadership methods and the conflict between the Party and the peasants during the time of the People’s Commune Movement. Several other essays on the question of human rights date from the 1980s and 1990s. The last two essays go beyond China to take up the debate on Asian values and the concept of peace in Asia. Given the unique perspective which differs from that of the ruling party and government in China, as well as the usual political realist perspective of the Western press, this book will contribute to a better understanding of the complex and entangled role of the intellectuals and the political process on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. It will be helpful to both the academic community and the well-educated general public.
Download or read book Hershey written by Michael D'Antonio and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: D'Antonio pens the first full biography of one of the most successful and unusual business titans of the 20th century--Milton Hershey--and a startling history of how his commanding fortune shaped a unique utopian legacy.
Download or read book The Dark Heart of Italy written by Tobias Jones and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2004 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jones recounts his four-year voyage across the Italian peninsula where, instead of the pastoral bliss he expected, he discovers unfathomable terrorism and deep-seated paranoia.
Download or read book Dreamworld and Catastrophe written by Susan Buck-Morss and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study develops the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept. Stressing the similarites between East/West the book examines extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.
Download or read book Contested Utopia written by Marc Rosenstein and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-03 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume to examine the Jewish state through the lens of Jewish utopian thought from its biblical beginnings to modernity, Contested Utopia illuminates a kaleidoscope of conflicting utopian visions influencing Israel.
Download or read book Differences in the City Postmetropolitan Heterotopias As Liberal Utopian Dreams written by Jorge León Casero and published by Nova Science Publishers. This book was released on 2020-10 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although it is one of the most vague and ambiguous concepts proposed by Foucault, the term "heterotopia" has been, and continues to be, one of the most widely used in technical as well as in human and social disciplines. Coinciding with the rise of postmodernism and the supposed crisis of the great unitary stories of the West, the great heterogeneity of urban and spatial phenomena and typologies referred to in the Foucauldian notion was further expanded, with the explicit intention of using it as part of the new urban ideology that neoliberal theorists of architecture and urbanism were beginning to implement under the leitmotif of the city by fragments. In this way, neoliberal urban ideology appropriated the concept of heterotopia, making it pass for libertarian and endowing it with the ability to exert political resistance to economic and urban planning by public administrations.This is why the concept of heterotopia has been used simultaneously and repeatedly as a tool to praise the beatitudes of neoliberal urbanism as well as to defend its emancipatory character by social movements and activists In this sense, the emancipatory potential that heterotopias could have had in the disciplinary arrangement of space has ended up transforming into a magic formula with which to transform the impositions of the neoliberal (de)arrangement of the territory into a hymn to freedom of movement, to a socio-cultural diversity without class conflict.The aim of this collective and interdisciplinary reflection is to prove that heterotopias are spaces that cannot be considered a priori as directly emancipatory but apart from an effective political project. As we live in a postmetropolitan word, we should ask: Are these post-metropolitan heterotopias capable of shaping themselves as the new nerve centers of anti-capitalist resistance or are they only capable of subverting the disciplinary power of public administrations already brought to crisis-point decades ago by neoliberal capitalism? Can they function as the spatial tools of an antagonistic politics for the common or, on the contrary, is their operation intrinsically neoliberal?This book brings together various analyses and investigations that maintain conflicting positions on the emancipatory or ideological-alienating character of heterotopias with the dual objective of avoiding their Western-centric bias and preserving any possible trait of emancipatory potential that may be rearticulated from an epistemological diversity viewpoint. With these objectives in mind, we have organized the twenty-two articles that make up this book into five major thematic sections, coinciding with some of the main topics around which socio-spatial debates dedicated to heterotopias have taken place in the last twenty-five years: the postmetropolis, public space, the right to the city, gender relations and their symbolic condition. Although these five categories should not be understood as unrelated compartments --but quite the opposite-- we have chosen to use this classification as an analytical tool to illuminate some of the focal points around which to exercise effective critique of one of the most frustratingly incomplete, inconsistent [and] incoherent concepts of socio-spatial theory.
