Hope is deeply utopian, not in the colloquial or naïve sense of idealism, nor as mere "wishful thinking." Hope is a political and imaginative praxis. It is rooted in the capacity and willingness to envision a radically different "there and then," and to work toward it, even when the "here and now"...

Contreras considers the short story "La máquina de la felicidad" by the Venezuelan writer Jesús Enrique Lossada, discussing its tale of mankind’s liberation through an apparatus.

I explore how utopian was an extraordinary word that became ordinary, a particular term that became general, and a reference to a physical place that became an idea.

Is it time to revive Epicureanism, perhaps as academic practice? 

Is there anything more tedious than the facile distinction between university study and the “real world”?

A history of forgetting is long overdue. I start it today with a short note prompted by recent news from Russia. The business section of The New York Times features an interesting piece by Andrew Kramer about the Russian government's push to replicate Silicon Valley by founding a new city not far from Moscow.

More's Utopia, like the humanist ideology it represents, celebrates dialogue—it is probably not going too far even to say that the fiction fetishizes dialogue. And yet, the depiction of Utopia is notably monological, for reasons that bear on both humanism of this moment and on the emergence of prose fiction as a vehicle for ideological critique.

In his dissertation "Medial Situations and Generic Possibility in the Long Eighteenth Century," Colin Moore argues that the picaresque fiction is predicated on a basic communicative situation that he calls "an encounter with a stranger," and that this condition in turn determines the nature of time and space in such a fiction. That is, each episode is a "one-time" event, and the landscape of the fiction is a ribbon of road on which the narrator and the reader cannot stop or go backward.

In his reply to my recent blog post, Joel Burges raises an important question: does the new imaginative thinking about history I find in recent literature and cinema also mean a "return to liberalism"?

Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is an odd but inescapable model for early modern European and transatlantic prose fiction, including the first novels. In the next few weeks I will reflect here on how an aspect of More's fictional commonwealth has a predictive power over later fictions: that is, what cannot be seen, done, or said in Utopia.