Figures of Utopia

This volume examines the concept of the utopic figure, focusing on the textual procedures through which utopian texts negotiate the limits of the imaginable. Drawing from literary theory and criticism, political philosophy, social history, cartography and geography, urban studies and visual culture, it discusses utopian figuration in relation to classical, early modern, and (post)modern contexts, dwelling on the aversion to stasis or civil war and the import of animality in the classical philosophical context; anxieties about value, the transformation of the geographical imaginary, the social place of the humanist intellectual and the specter of surplus populations in early modernity; the literary engagement with the possibilities and risks involved in daydreaming, everyday life, and the strange dialectic between utopia and spectrality in modernity. Lastly, it examines the dialectic of utopianism and Marxism from the 19th century to the present.

With surefooted dialectical rigor, Figures of Utopia proposes a narratologically and philosophically astute new accounting of utopia’s enigmatic figural labors. Revivifying foundational texts, theories, and constitutional antinomies alike, Balasopoulos’s lucid, timely, and sweeping study not only maps the allegorical dynamics of utopian form but also affirms the unique ways that utopia’s multivalent estrangements live in and contend with history.

— Eric D. Smith, Professor of English, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Figures of Utopia brims with literary and philosophical brilliance and establishes Balasopoulos as a preeminent scholar of both Utopian Studies and Marxist hermeneutics. With daunting conceptual rigor and lucid exegesis, the essays in this volume track a long history of utopian textuality stretching from the ancient to the contemporary, and in so doing, Balasopoulos makes the demands of the "not yet" more legible, felt, and relevant.

— Sarah Hogan, Associate Professor of English, Wake Forest University