This is the kind of book that utopian studies needs.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society
<i>Becoming Utopian</i> is an invaluable explication of utopian thought and its link to sf since the 1960s. The book also provides a model for how producing knowledge in these fields is a pedagogically enriching as well as intellectually satisfying engagement with the world in which we live.
Science Fiction Studies
Tom Moylan has been one of the reference authors in the formation of an international academic field of utopian studies … concerned with the transformation of the current world. … Hence, the importance of this book in which he has included nine of his works representative of the contributions with which he has stimulated and enriched the intellectual debate throughout the last 15 years.
Historia y Política
<i>Becoming Utopian </i>is a synthesis of engagements and concerns and a completion of hermeneutic and political wagers, a vital addition to socially conscious and politically engaged scholarship, and a contribution that may prove as lasting as Moylan’s two major works that preceded it. It is mature, engaged, and urgent at once, just as it is both profoundly self-reflexive and passionately attuned to the difference inherent in utopian rupture. It is an always already classical work, for it is a work of authentic humanist sensibility that is poised to inspire and nurture scholarship for years to come.
Dr. Antonis Balasopoulos, University of Cyprus
In Becoming Utopian, preeminent utopian studies scholar Tom Moylan explores a broad terrain of utopian expression. Refusing the division between the personal and the political, Moylan masterfully illuminates connections among utopian texts, political practices, and processes of subjectivization. This is politicized utopianism and militant optimism of the highest order.
- Kathi Weeks, Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, Duke University, USA,
Preface, Ruth Levitas
Introduction: Becoming Utopian
1. Strong Thought in Hard Times: Utopia, Pedagogy, Agency
2. Bloch Against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function
3. Denunciation/Annunciation: The Utopian Methodology of Liberation Theology
4. Look Into the Dark: On Dystopia and the Novum
5. Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction
6. N-H-N: Kim Stanley Robinson's Dialectics of Ecology
7. "To Live Consciously is to Sow the Whirlwind": Reflecions on the Utopian Standpoint of Nonviolence
8. Steps of Renewed Praxis: Tracking the Utopian Method
9. Still Demanding the Impossible: '68 and the Critical Utopian Imagination
Afterword, Philip E. Wegner (University of Florida, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index