Nach einem Rekurs über den Utopiebegriff wurden sowohl im diarischen Werk als auch in der veröffentlichten Prosa Brigitte Reimanns utopische Konzeptionen aufgespürt. Gesucht wurde das Utopische sowohl in den Beschreibungen einer konkreten Gesellschaftsutopie, als auch in den literarischen „Verfeinerungen“ einer kruden Ideologie, wie im kritischen Hinterfragen des „Noch-Nicht-Bewussten“ (Ernst Bloch). Als ästhetische Utopien wurden auch Wunschbilder des Alltags, Träume, Märchen und Mythen gedeutet. Ausführliche Untersuchungen beschäftigten sich mit der Gestaltung der weiblichen Figuren und ihrer Entwicklung von der ideologisch (auch männlich) indoktrinierten Protagonistin zur „freien“ Ich–Gestalterin. Nachgewiesen wurde sowohl im diarischen Werk, als auch in der veröffentlichten Prosa eine Wandlung des Utopieverständnisses von der Gesellschaftsutopie zur subjektiven „Augenblicksutopie“, die im Deutungshorizont der Literatur der Romantik auch als DDR-spezifische Innerlichkeit verstanden werden könnte, welche mit ihrem Rückzug ins Individuelle die ritualisierte DDR-Öffentlichkeit desavouierte. / After a study of the term of Utopia, Utopian concepts were discovered both in the diary texts and in the published prose of Brigitte Reimann′s oeuvre. The Utopian was searched in the descriptions of concrete social Utopia as well as in the literary <EM>Verfeinerungen</EM> of crude ideology and in the critical research of the <EM>Noch-Nicht-Bewusste</EM> (Ernst Bloch). Wishful thinking, dreams, fairy-tales and myths were interpreted as an aesthetic Utopia. Detailed researches were engaged in a study of representation of feminine characters and their development from the ideological indoctrinated protagonist to the “free” <EM>Ich-Gestalterin</EM>. The change in understanding of Utopia from the social Utopia to the <EM>Augenblicksutopie</EM> could be proved both in the diary texts and in the published prose of Brigitte Reimann. In the <EM>Deutungshorizont</EM> of Romantic literature it may be understood as a specific <EM>DDR-Innerlichkeit</EM>, which with its retreat into individualism showed up the ritual public.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

Twentieth-century Indian and Sri Lankan literatures (in English, in particular) have shown a strong tendency towards conceptualising the rural and the village within the dichotomous paradigms of utopia and dystopia. Such representations have consequently cast the village in idealized (pastoral) or in realist (counter-pastoral/dystopic) terms. In Chapters One and Two, I read together Mohandas Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1908) and Leonard Woolf’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) and argue that Gandhi and Woolf can be seen at the head of two important, but discrete, ways of reading the South Asian village vis-à-vis utopian thought, and that at the intersection of these two ways lies a rich terrain for understanding the many forms in which later twentieth-century South Asian writers chose to re-create city-village-nation dialectics. In this light, I examine in Chapter Three the work of Raja Rao (Kanthapura, 1938) and O. V. Vijayan (The Legends of Khasak, 1969) and in Chapter Four the writings of Martin Wickramasinghe (Gamperaliya, 1944) and Punyakante Wijenaike (The Waiting Earth, 1966) as providing a re-visioning of Gandhi’s and Woolf’s ideas of the rural as a site for civic and national transformation. I conclude by examining in Chapter Five Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) as emblematic of a recent turn in South Asian fiction centred on the rural where the village embodies a “heterotopic” space that critiques and offers a conceptual alternative to the categorical imperatives of utopia and dystopia. I use Michel Foucault’s notion of the “heterotopia” to re-evaluate the utopian dimension in these novels. Although Foucault himself under-theorized the notion of heterotopia and what he did say connected the idea to urban landscapes and imaginaries, we may yet recuperate from his formulations a “third space” of difference that provides an opportunity to rethink the imperatives of utopia in literature and helps understand the rural in twentieth-century South Asian writing in new ways.

My thesis is a critical essay thematically focused on the fate of the body in the postmodern condition. In this thesis a fundamental question is posed: What happens to the (postmodern) body under the double pressure of postmodern technology and culture? Is the postmodern body altered under the pressure of postmodern technology and culture? How contemporary thought and architecture impact the body will also be examined. This thesis discusses the above questions through several key concepts such as exilic conditions, heterotopias and ‘trans’ states of being. After elaborating on these issues, this thesis attempts to design an architectural project “Hamam Complex” on a unique natural island in the Bosporus strait that separates the Western and Eastern worlds.

My thesis is a critical essay thematically focused on the fate of the body in the postmodern condition. In this thesis a fundamental question is posed: What happens to the (postmodern) body under the double pressure of postmodern technology and culture? Is the postmodern body altered under the pressure of postmodern technology and culture? How contemporary thought and architecture impact the body will also be examined. This thesis discusses the above questions through several key concepts such as exilic conditions, heterotopias and ‘trans’ states of being. After elaborating on these issues, this thesis attempts to design an architectural project “Hamam Complex” on a unique natural island in the Bosporus strait that separates the Western and Eastern worlds.

This thesis focuses on the architectural production of Red Vienna in 1920s to examine the bourgeois conception of social housing program in a governmental socialist understanding of housing. Having a structural transformation through the First World War, Vienna became the enclave of Socialist Democrat Party and thereafter underwent radical housing and cultural transformative programs. Within these programs, it was intended to give the working-class the accurate social position by means of provided accessibility to their own private and public spheres. Among a wide range of housing examples built during the governance of the party, Karl Marx Hof, one of the largest projects, has been chosen to examine the reflections of bourgeois conception of culture. Based on the contradictory discourse and practices in political, architectural and cultural realms, the aim of the research is to redefine the privacy of the dwellings and the public qualities of the common spaces and thereafter to situate the proletarian housing in relation to bourgeois spatial values within the history of domestic space in Vienna.

Critical theory has historically situated the beginning of the “modern” era of subjectivity near the end of the seventeenth century. Michel Foucault himself once said in an interview that modernity began with the writings of the late seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict Spinoza. But an examination of early modern English utopian literature demonstrates that a modern notion of subjectivity can be found in texts that pre-date Spinoza. In this dissertation, I examine four utopian texts—Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Margaret Cavendish’s Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World, and Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines—through the paradigm of Jacques Lacan’s tripartite model of subjectivity—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. To mediate between Lacan’s psychoanalytic model and the historical aspects of these texts, such as their relationship with print culture and their engagement with political developments in seventeenth-century England, I employ the theories of the Marxist-Lacanian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, to show that “early modern” subjectivity is in in fact no different from critical theory’s “modern” subject, despite pre-dating the supposed inception of such subjectivity. In addition, I engage with other prominent theorists, including Fredric Jameson, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway, to come to an understanding about the ways in which critical theory can be useful to understand not only early modern literature, but also the contemporary, “real” world and the subjectivity we all seek to attain.

This research uses the recent development of bus rapid transit (BRT) on Cleveland, Ohio’s Euclid Avenue corridor as a case-study to explore the links between public transit, public space, and urban planning. Using Fredric Jameson’s (1981) method of textual analysis from The Political Unconscious, I explore the ways the BRT provides access to a buried class consciousness in the city as well as a “symbolic resolution” between conflicting agendas of development and equity. Contextualizing the new spaces of the BRT using a synthesis of Jameson’s (1984) theorization of postmodernism, Mike Davis’ (1990) militarization of public space, and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) spatial practices, I discuss the ways these spaces are remade by individual users as a vital public space despite the BRT’s embedded market ideology and repressive security apparatus. Additionally, I explore what BRT’s ‘ideology of form’ can tell us about the ideology of the dominant paradigm of planning today, New Urbanism, and use it as departure for a closing discussion of Utopian desires in planning. / text

As Aristotle wrote, rhetoric is an art or faculty of finding the available means of persuasion in a given circumstance, and the late nineteenth century was a time in American history when many authors used utopian fiction as the best available means of persuasion. For a few years, the utopian novel became a widespread, versatile and common rhetorical trope. Edward Bellamy was the most popular of these writers. Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward was not only the third best-selling book of nineteenth century America, it inspired over a hundred other utopian novels and helped create a mass movement of “Bellamy clubs” along with a political party (Nationalism). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, American public discourse underwent a general shift from a focus on communal values to a focus on individuals as the source of truth. Utopian fiction of the era helps illuminate why and how this shift occurred. In nineteenth century America, literature was generally not considered to be rhetorical. At most, critics treated fiction as a form of epideictic rhetoric, aiming only to delight, educate, or create discussion. When fiction was used to promote legislative agendas and thus entered into the realm of deliberative rhetoric, critics argued that its transgression of rhetorical boundaries supposedly ruined its appeal. Utopian literature came the closest to breaking down the barriers between literature and rhetoric, as hundreds of utopian novels were published, most of them in response to Edward Bellamy. A close rhetorical reading of Looking Backward details its rhetorical nature and helps account for its rhetorical success. I treat each of the novels as participants in the larger cultural conversation, and detail the ways in which they address Bellamy, each other, and issues such as the temperance movement and the decline of classical languages in higher education. In modern times, though Bellamy has faded from the public memory, he has proven useful in a variety of contexts, from a political punching bag to a way to lend an air of erudition to various types of popular fiction. / text

Il est peu de notions aussi vastes que celle du non-savoir, mais le flou du caractère nécessairement négatif de sa définition s’accompagne tout de même du sentiment que la source de ce qui ne peut qu’être déterminé négativement par la pensée (non, cela n’est pas le savoir) ne peut qu’être positive. Notion à l’applicabilité infinie, parce qu’en elle vient s’abîmer tout ce qui ne peut tenir dans l’espace de la maîtrise relative à ce dont on peut dire : je sais de quoi il s’agit. Est non-savoir tout ce qui se rapporte au bouillonnement pulsionnel de la vie et à l’échéance fatale de la mort. Ce qui pousse l’homme au meurtre, au génocide, à la guerre et à la violence révolutionnaire se confond avec un contenu affectif et identitaire qui ne peut être ramené au savoir sans laisser de reste. Mais tenter de comprendre ce qui échappe à l’entendement est cela même qui relance sans cesse la réflexion comprise comme cœur du savoir. Le savoir se montre ainsi sous une extrême dépendance face à son Autre. À la lumière de cette hypothèse devant beaucoup aux découvertes de la psychanalyse, le présent mémoire s’est donné pour objectif de jeter un regard frais sur quelques grandes tensions sociopolitiques de l’Histoire; mais il a d’abord fallu évaluer philosophiquement la possibilité d’un concept de non-savoir. Des champs identitaires majeurs — révolutions totalitaires ou démocratiques, bouleversements ou synergies culturelles — sont ainsi analysés sous l’angle d’une économie pulsionnelle qui s’inscrit dans une interaction perpétuelle avec ce qui s’ébauche ici comme une économie du rapport entre non-savoir et savoir. Est ainsi produite une esquisse des rapports possibles entre la vie pulsionnelle de l’homme, le savoir institutionnel et le monde sociopolitique. / Few notions are as vast as that unknowing; but the imprecise nature of its definition is nonetheless accompagnied by the implication that what offers itself only negatively to the mind has a positive source. The applicability of the notion of unknowing is infinite; it swallows up all that resists the mastery indicated by statements about that which is. Unknowing encompasses all that belongs to the boiling drive of life and to the faceless moment of death. What leads human beings to murder, to genocide, to war and to revolutionnary violence is bound up with an affective content of identification that cannot be subsumed by knowledge without leaving a residue. Yet attempting to understand what exceeds the mind’s grasp serves as the motor of mental reflection at the heart of knowledge production itself. In this sense, knowledge is inescapably dependent on its « other ». In light of this hypothesis drawn from the domain of psychoanalysis, this thesis aims to reexamine the conceptual underpinnings of basic sociopolitical tensions in History. The conceptual impetus driving major identity movements — such as totalitarian or democratic revolutions and cultural disruptions or synergies — is analysed in terms of a libidinal or drive-oriented economy which is in perpetual interaction with what this thesis characterizes as an economy of the relation between knowing and unknowing, between knowledge and its negation.