This is a comparative study of the utopian societies depicted in Plato's Republic, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, and B.F.Skinner's Walden Two. Two different interpretive perspectives--analytical and artisitic--are employed in a complementary manner to effect the study. The analytical study investigates and compares each test within the following frameworks: political foundations; education of children; roles of women; family structures. The major conclusions are that all three utopian constructs are characterized by (a) complementary educational methods for the young, (b) gender equality, (c) a high degree of role specialization based on individual's intrinsic aptitudes, (d) a lack of political conflict, (e) the achievement of social unification through pursuit of common goals, and (f) complementary social structures for communal living. The artistic interpretation is embodied in three paintings, each depicting one of the utopian societies. These visually illustrate the above frameworks as applied to each utopia. To illustrate the conclusions of the analytical investigation the three paintings, when placed side by side, become a unified whole further illustrating the above noted commonalities among the three utopias. / 149 leaves : col. ill. ; 28 cm.

Scientistic authors in the latter half of the 19 th century and the early 20th century, such as Ernest Renan and H. G. Wells, discounted revealed religion. Yet they believed in the secular myth of an imminent technological Eden and they elevated science itself to the dignity of a religion. In so doing, they shaped bold visions of the future, drawing heavily on a millenary store of Western myth and metaphor. In historical terms, the myth of an imminent technological Eden represents a survival and a fusion of the ancient Greek myth of the Golden Age along with three Judeo-Christian myths: Biblical time, Earthly Paradise and the Apocalypse. Since the Enlightenment, the process of secularization has drained the religious content of such myths, although it does not deprive them of any of their deeply emotional force. This explains why the 19th century myth of an imminent technological Eden has considerable staying-power, in spite of the many events since 1945 which seem to discredit it.

Issued also as thesis, Mainz. / On spine: Devolutionistische Utopie. Summary in English. Bibliography: p. 193-210.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: [53]-54)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Iowa, 2009. / Thesis supervisors: Tom Lutz, Rob Latham. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 239-248).

No description available.

"May 2003." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-226). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2006. / "May, 2006." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-55). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

In response to theoretical inquiries into the decline in the production of utopian literature, this dissertation argues that the decline or, rather, the "postmodern" loss of faith in utopian literature and utopian thinking results from the neo-liberal globalization of capitalism and its material and discursive/ideological appropriation of global space. To demonstrate this thesis, the dissertation examines the invariably dystopic imaginative geographies in the fiction of J. G. Ballard. By analyzing the historical-geographical discursive context of Ballard's imaginative geographies, the dissertation attempts to locate and recover those absent spaces that might have served as probable sites of Utopia. / The first part of this dissertation examines Ballard's "Concentration City," "Report on an Unidentified Space Station," "The Enormous Space," "The Overloaded Man," and the novel High-Rise. This section concludes generally that the imaginative geographies inscribed within those texts are closed, insular, homogeneous, pathological and exclusionary social spaces that are antithetical to a Postmodern Utopia whose socio-cultural inclusiveness would be predicated upon a "politics of difference." / The second half of the dissertation examines Ballard's later works, such as Rushing to Paradise (1994), Cocaine Nights (1996), and Super-Cannes (2001). By discursively analyzing the similar yet more ideologically transparent imaginative geographies in these recent works, the dissertation concludes that it is not exclusively the material and ideological conquest of social space by global capital that poses the greatest threat to Ballard's "utopian" socio-spatial imaginary. Rather, it is also the postcolonial threat of the dislocations and mass immigrations of the Indigenous Other precipitated by globalization. It is the emergence of the de-territorialized Other that impels Ballard's imaginative geographies to recoil inwardly into "Privatopias," "white enclaves" and "imperial ghettos" demarcated by neocolonial pathological geographies of exclusion.