Description: This edited volume brings together an interdisciplinary collection of scholars to explore, both theoretically and methodologically, the possibilities for articulating and pursuing utopian thinking on a smaller scale in media and literature.
Brief description: Henrik Gustafsson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Culture and Literature, University of Tromsø, Norway, and a member of the Nomadikon Centre of Visual Culture. He is the author of Out of Site: Landscape and Cultural Reflexivity in New Hollywood Cinema, 1969-1974 (2008) and the editor (together with Asbjørn Grønstad) of Ethics and Images of Pain (2012).
Review Quotes:
"Uncovering the utopian impulse in diverse cultural works, this elegant book attends to the many subtle, transient, dispersed moments of social hope, desire, and change. Developing the concept of microutopias through an analysis of films, literature, music and more, this book not only reveals the presence and importance of microutopianism within social life, but demonstrates what microutopianism offers as an analytical method. An original and vibrant contribution to utopian studies." --Davina Cooper, Research Professor in Law and Political Theory, King's College London, UK
"This engaging and engaged collection moves from a concern with utopia as critically bound up with the practices, rhythms and spaces of everyday life, offering possible glimpses of a transformed way of living from within the constraints of a shared reality. Reading widely across and between medias and cultures, its authors invite us to understand afresh the many traces of a better world that surround us in the cultural practices and products of the present. This way of reading can itself, they suggest, be a vehicle of hope." --Michael G. Kelly, Professor of French, University of Limerick, Ireland