Ralph Pordzik

The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia is a critical introduction to utopian and dystopian fiction written in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Africa, and India. It outlines the development of utopian writing over the last thirty years and analyzes the relationship between postcolonial and utopian issues foregrounded in these works. Based on a comparative approach that takes into account the different traditions the texts are derived from, this book examines the function of utopian alternatives and dystopian anxieties in the writings of a wide range of well-known authors such as Janet Frame, David Ireland, J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, Rodney Hall, Buchi Emecheta, Margaret Atwood, Glenda Adams, John Cranna, Suniti Namjoshi, Mike Nicol, Ben Okri, Gerald Murnane, and Timothy Findley.

A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in the New English Literatures

The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia

This book testifies to the growing interest in the many spaces of utopia. It intends to 'map out' on utopian and science-fiction discourses some of the new and revisionist models of spatial analysis applied in Literary and Cultural Studies in recent years. The aim of the volume is to side-step the established generic binary of utopia and dystopia or science fiction and thus to open the analysis of utopian literature to new lines of inquiry. The essays collected here propose to think of utopias not so much as fictional texts about future change and transformation but as vital elements in a cultural process through which social, spatial and subjective identities are formed. Utopias can thus be read as textual systems implying a distinct spatial and temporal dimension; as 'spatial practices' that tend to naturalize a cultural and social construction - that of the 'good life', the radically improved welfare state, the Christian paradise, the counter-society, etc. - and make that representation operational by interpellating their readers in some determinate relation to their givenness as sites of political and individual improvement. This volume is of interest for all scholars and students of literature who wish to explore the ways in which utopias of the past and recent present have circulated as media of cultural exchange and homogenization, as sites of cultural and linguistic appropriation and as foci for the spatial formation of national and regional identities in the English-speaking world.

Space in Utopian and Science Fiction Discourses

Futurescapes

The aim of this book is to bring into focus some of the major moves in western discourses about tourism and travel writing from the early Victorian to the late modern or post-western age. It offers a series of readings connecting the work of travel writers as diverse as Alexander Kinglake, William Cobbett, George Henry Borrow, E.M. Forster and Bruce Chatwin to their respective cultural and material contexts. The grounding model is that of travel writing as a form of cultural intervention and the individual text as an artificial yet intermediary space that constantly stimulates the travellers' consciousness, moving them to revise judgements passed on their own as well as on the other culture. In individual chapters, the study explores different stages of revision in travel discourse since the late-romantic age, surveys new touristic models installed in the place of received notions of picturesque or adventurous travel and analyses the role of exotic and nostalgic registers in the construction of cultural value.

Fiction, Tourism and the Social Construction of the Nostalgic

The Wonder of Travel

Hans Ulrich Seeber

Utopie und dystopie in den neuen englischen Literaturen

In der Tradition von Walter Benjamins Einbahnstrasse" und Gunter Eichs Maulwurfen" entfuhren diese Texte den Leser in eine Welt, in der Wirklichkeit und Zeichen sich in immer neuen Bildern gegen den einheitlichen, rationalen Sinn verschworen. Mit kontemplativer und ironischer Kraft entdeckt diese Prosa die Unsicherheit im Gesicherten, das Unterschwellige im Oberflachlichen. Die Spannungen an der Oberflache der Sprachen erhalten Konturen, ignorieren und verschweigen das Altbekannte, betonen das Absurde und Spielerische. Durch Schachte und Labyrinthe geht es in komische und melancholische Landschaften, die auf den Karten der Literatur bislang noch nicht eingetragen waren

Die Welt hinter Kulka

Dieser fingiert chronistische Band versammelt Aufzeichnungen, Tagesbeichten, Exerzitien und Destillate aus den Jahren 2011 bis 2018.

Ralph Pordzik

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