Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity

by Phillip E. Wegner

Drawing from literary history, social theory, and political critique, this far-reaching study explores the utopian narrative as a medium for understanding the social space of the modern nation-state. Considering the narrative utopia from its earliest manifestation in Thomas More's sixteenth-century work Utopia to some of the most influential utopias of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book is an astute study of a literary genre as well as a nuanced dialectical meditation on the history of utopian thinking as a quintessential history of modernity.

As he unravels the dialectics at work in the utopian narrative, Wegner gives an ambitious synthetic discussion of theories of modernity, considering and evaluating the ideas of writers such as Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Henri Lefebvre, Paul de Man, Karl Mannheim, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Zizek, and Homi Bhabha.

Genres: Utopia, Nonfiction, Theory

324 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2002

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some lines of good analysis, but they remain largely well-hidden.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you enjoy reading utopias this is an interesting book. It is literary criticism and may be challenging for the uninitiated, but rewarding. In his own words,

  

  As I hope will become evident, I conceive of my book itself as another kind of experiment in utopian figuration, or of cognitive mapping: an attempt to create at once a historical and theoretical overview of the work of past narrative utopias, and to produce my own "speaking picture" of a history still in formation, and hence "not yet" available for a final summation. And as with the various narrative utopias I discuss throughout this book, I imagine this project as an invitation to see the histories of modernity in a new way, so that we might also begin to imagine anew the space of our present and future. As this book will show, such imaginings are indeed real, and they will shape, as much as the imaginary communities of the past, the paths we embark upon in hour attempts to make our futures.
  

I think I will probably be revisiting this work over time as I think more about Wegner’s challenges and re-readings. I am especially interested in the thought that his arguments could be applied to the current open source movements in IT and the creation of virtual communities on line.

If you are interested in this work, you may want to be familiar with the following works:
Utopia, Thomas Moore
Looking Backward , Edward Bellamy
Red Star, Alexander Bogddanov
The Iron Heel, Jack London
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin
1984, George Orwell

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 2 out of 5]

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