Postmodern Utopias And Feminist Fictions

Author : Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2013-07-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781107245235

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Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor Pdf

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.

Author : Alkeline van Lenning,Marrie Bekker,Ine Vanwesenbeeck
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Social Science
ISBN : UVA:X006048557

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Feminist Utopias in a Postmodern Era by Alkeline van Lenning,Marrie Bekker,Ine Vanwesenbeeck Pdf

There is a respectable feminist tradition in utopian thought. Dreams and fantasies about gender-equal, women-friendly or female-dominated worlds have been formulated abundantly. However, utopian thinking has also met with severe criticism. By definition, utopias were said to be too idealistic, and of little use in the process of societal change. More recently, it has been stressed that the concept of utopia has been superseded by postmodern awareness, in which general explanations of gender inequality (and, along with them, general utopian views) are disqualified to the benefit of more local and more specific theories. In this book, the reader will find not one general, broadly defined utopia, but instead, a wide array of more or less specific, feminist utopias. Utopias are viewed as preliminary and imaginary goals from which present situations can be revalued and from which strategies for change can be developed. As such, utopias have not lost their significance.

Author : Libby Falk Jones,Sarah McKim Webster Goodwin
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 1990
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0870496360

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Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative by Libby Falk Jones,Sarah McKim Webster Goodwin Pdf

Author : Magali Cornier Michael
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 1996-07-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781438412986

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Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse by Magali Cornier Michael Pdf

Michael analyzes the intersections between feminist politics and postmodern aesthetics as demonstrated in recent Anglo-American fiction. While much has been written on various aspects of postmodernism and postmodern fiction and of feminism and feminist fiction, very little attention has been given to the postmodern aesthetic strategies that surface in post-World War II feminist fiction. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse examines ways in which many widely read and acclaimed novels with feminist impulses engage and transform subversive aesthetic strategies usually associated with postmodern fiction to strengthen their feminist political edge. The author discusses many examples of recent feminist-postmodern fiction, and explores in greater depth Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. She shows that feminist-postmodern fiction's emphasis on the material historical situation—the link to activist politics and commitment to enacting concrete changes in the world, and thus the need to reach a large reading public—often results in a blending and transformation of postmodern and realist aesthetic forms. Moreover, feminist fiction uses deconstructive strategies not only to disrupt the status quo but also to create a space for reconstruction, particularly of recreating new forms of female subjectivities and feminist aesthetics.

Author : Marleen S. Barr
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : American fiction
ISBN : UOM:39076001346894

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Feminist Fabulation by Marleen S. Barr Pdf

Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether.

Author : Frances Bartkowski
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 1989-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0803212054

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Feminist Utopias by Frances Bartkowski Pdf

The utopias envisioned by Edward Bellamy and other novelists late in the nineteenth century were generally blueprints of government. As satellites of men, women were expected to share in the general improvement of society. The resurgence of the feminist movement since the late 1960s has produced a very different kind of utopian literature. Frances Bartkowski explores a body of work that is striking and vital because it reflects the hopes, fears, and desires of women who have glimpsed the possibilities of a bright new world freed from stifling patriarchal structures. Feminist Utopias is a comparative study of the utopian fiction of nine women writers in the United States, France, and Canada. Except for Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915), the prototype for feminist literary utopias, all of the works were published between 1969 and 1986. Bartkowski discusses Monique Wittig's Les Guärill_res, Joanna Russ's The Female Man, Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, Suzy McKee Charnas's Motherlines, Christine Rochefort's Archaos, ou le jardin ätincelant, E. M. Broner's A Weave of Women, Louky Bersianik's The Eugelionne, and two dystopian novels, Charnas's Walk to the End of the World and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid?s Tale.

Author : Jane Donawerth,Jane L. Donawerth,Carol A. Kolmerten,Carol A. Kolmenter
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0815626193

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Utopian and Science Fiction by Women by Jane Donawerth,Jane L. Donawerth,Carol A. Kolmerten,Carol A. Kolmenter Pdf

"This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Mitchison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Author : Lucy Sargisson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2002-11-01
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781134767663

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Contemporary Feminist Utopianism by Lucy Sargisson Pdf

A new and challenging entry into the debates between feminism and postmodernism, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism challenges some basic preconceptions about the role of political theory today. Sargisson explores current debates within utopian studies, feminist theory and poststructuralist deconstruction. Utopian thinking is offered as a route out of the dilemma of contemporary feminism as well as a way of conceptualizing its current situation. This book provides an exploration of, and exercise in, utopian thought.

Author : Tobin Siebers
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Art
ISBN : 0472105574

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Heterotopia by Tobin Siebers Pdf

Considers the uses and dangers of utopian thinking in the postmodern world

Author : Marleen S. Barr
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 1993
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0807844217

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Lost in Space by Marleen S. Barr Pdf

Archaeologists and anthropologists discover other civilizations; science fiction writers invent them. In this collection of her major essays, Marleen Barr argues that feminist science fiction writers contribute to postmodern literary canons with radical a

Author : Tatiana Teslenko
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 363 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2003-08-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135885168

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Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s by Tatiana Teslenko Pdf

This book presents an exploration of the reinvented utopia that provided second-wave feminists of the 1970s with a conceptual space to articulate the politics of change. Tatiana Teslenko argues that utopian fiction of this decade offered a means of validating the personal as well as the political, and of criticizing a patriarchal social order. Teslenko reveals feminists' attempt through fiction to envision a new political order.

Author : Patricia Waugh
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 1989-01-01
Category : American fiction
ISBN : 0415015472

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Feminine Fictions by Patricia Waugh Pdf

Author : Marianne DeKoven
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2004-05-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0822332698

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Utopia Limited by Marianne DeKoven Pdf

DIVThe end of the modern and the emergence of the postmodern in 1960s philosophy, literature, and popular culture./div

Author : Judith A. Little
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Fiction
ISBN : UOM:39015070748952

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Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction by Judith A. Little Pdf

Using selections from writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree jr., and many others, this collection shows how the imagined worlds of science fiction create hold experiments for testing feminist hypotheses and for interpreting philosophical questions about humanity, gender, equality and more. Four main themes: Part 1, 'Human nature and reality', concentrates on whether there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Part 2, 'Dystopias: the worst of all possible worlds', portrays misogynistic societies uncomfortably familiar to the early 21st-century reader. Part 3, 'Separatist utopias: worlds of difference', assembles stories that scrutinize both the virtues and vices of separatism. In Part 4, 'Androgynous utopias: worlds of equality', the authors create worlds that anticipate the consequences, good and bad, of perfect sexual equality in education, intelligence, capability, and reproduction.

Author : Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 137 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2021-04-29
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781000376357

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Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond by Douglas A. Vakoch Pdf

Caught as we are in a grave climate crisis that seems more irreversible with every passing year, our literary portrayals of the future often feature the dystopian collapse of the world as we know it. Science fiction explores how we got here, while pointing toward a more hopeful path forward. From an ecofeminist perspective, a core cause of our current ecological catastrophe is the patriarchal domination of nature, playing out in parallel with the oppression of women. As an alternative to dystopian futures that seem increasingly inevitable, ecofeminist science fiction helps us conjure utopias that promote environmental sustainability based on more egalitarian human relationships. Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond: Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction explores the fictional worlds of such canonical novelists as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Joan Slonczewski, as well as those of lesser-known science fiction writers, as they collectively probe humanity’s greatest existential threats. Contributors from five continents provide compelling analyses of far future dystopias on Earth that are all too easy to imagine becoming reality if humankind’s current trajectory continues, as well as provocative insights into science fiction utopias set on idyllic planets orbiting distant stars, which offer liberatory alternatives that might someday be actualized in the real world. By examining the links between the destruction of the environment and the domination of women, Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond provides the tools to counteract those intertwined oppressions, helping create a foundation for a truly habitable world.