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

The ideal city project was a performance that presented the design for an ideal city with stories about how that imaginary city failed. The design was represented as a 4’0” x 4’0” wood and Styrofoam sculpture. Upon seeing this design, seven writers created scenes and monologues outlining the destruction of the city. The flaws they discovered were not designed into the city intentionally. In fact, the writers pointed to several different sources for the downfall ranging from issues with its layout to socio-political breakdowns. At the end of the performance the audience was left with the ruins of something that was once so full of hope. This piece was intended to serve as a reminder that cities are not predetermined utopias, but continually changing and evolving environments created by those who live in them. Even the best examples eventually fail or evolve into something different. However, this does not mean we stop trying to create better places to live. George Bernard Shaw said “A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Theater performances provide an excellent way to explore ideas and create dialogue about what these better places look like and how they function. / text

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Le silence est a peu pres total, dans la litterature franciase du dix-septieme siecle, sur tout ce qui touche a la pedagogie, mais ce silence merite d'etre scrute et explique. L'enseignement de l'epoque a des caracteres utopiques nettement marques, et c'est par les voyages imaginaires et les utopies que s'expriment les preoccupations pedagogiques, essentielles aux yeus des uptopistes. A la contestation pedagogique est liee la contestation religieuse : le dogme du peche originel doit etre ecarte pour ouvrir la voie au progres pedagogique. Le progres social et politique depend d'un progres pedagogique prealable. Plusieurs utopistes ont affirme la necessite de la creation d'une langue nouvelle parfaitement logique et destinee a remplacer le latin. Ainsi les utopies sont la manifestation d'un courant cache tendant a remettre en question la pedagogie de l'epoque.

The citizens of utopian Renaissance cities have in common the confidence in the power of reason and moral virtues. The purpose of the thesis is to prove that, in spite of the imaginative and unreal aspects of these utopian societies, they contain the prodroms of the modern societies. / The utopias of the Renaissance are projects of a new commonwealth, based on justice and education. The Italian peninsula of the XVI and early XVII century spawned several works belonging to this literary genre, inspired by Plato's Republic and initiated in England with Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Those considered in this thesis, besides Utopia, are: Francesco Doni's Il mondo savio e pazzo (1552), Francesco Patrizi's La Citta felice (1553), Ludovico Agostini's La Repubblica immaginaria (1580), Tommaso Campanella's La Citta del Sole (The City of the Sun) (1602) and Lodovico Zuccolo's Il Belluzzi (1621). / The thesis examines these six main literary works according to the concept of uchronie and escapism, the definitions of utopia by Karl Mannheim, J.C. Davis and Mikhail Bakhtin, the religious and Arcadian elements and the relationship between utopia and satire. The thesis analyzes three essential aspects of the utopian tales: city planning, relationship between man and woman, and education. The utopias of the Renaissance also reveal two different visions: one innovative if compared to the society of the time, and another, post-tridentina, oriented towards a return to more traditional values. The thesis examines the influence of More's work on the utopias of the Renaissance by analyzing and comparing a series of topics, like the title of the work, the narrator, fantastical names and ideas, the role of Plato, property and inequity, the choice of woman and the concept of beauty, daily labor, the function of God, and the concept of law. / The utopias of the Renaissance have various modern aspects: a utilitarian justice, a better place of woman in the society, the laicity of the government, the "rationality" of war, secularism, education, health, social justice, assistance to elderly. They also contain myopias, like an unrealistic economic model and a static society.

This thesis examines the forms of utopianism which developed in U.S. fiction after the Civil War, from Mark Twain to Jack London. It covers the genres and subgenres of the utopia of reform, the fiction of occult utopianism, the lost-race romance, the post-catastrophe utopia, and the dystopia. Its central argument is that utopianism provides a means of developing alternative horizons of historiosophy and of building images of otherness, as it is also an argumentative apparatus which allows utopists to comment on their empirical society, as the other side of otherness. Nineteenth-century U.S. utopian fiction conveyed, through an increasing deconstruction of the utopian genre, conflicting interpretations of such elements of American myth-history as the stock image of America as a new Eden and paradise of abundance, the American Dream, and Manifest Destiny. This helps explain the fragmentation of the utopian genre within literary discourse and its cooptation by modern science fiction as it developed after the first decade of the twentieth century.

In this study, radical socialist articles written on feminism, the feminist movement and the woman question published between 1987 and 1994 in Turkey are examined. The study attempts at describing, classifying and analyzing the Turkish socialist discourse manifested in response to the emergence of feminism in Turkey. It is argued that the Turkish socialists&rsquo / approaches to feminism and the feminists do not differ much, nor a change in their approaches with time can be observed. It is also argued that the theoretical content of the radical socialist articles is usually futile and far from being comprehensive.

Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Division of Humanities, Department of English, 2003. / Bibliography: p. 250-270. / Introduction -- Female subjectivity, abjection, and agency in Scenes of clerical life -- A questionable Utopia: Adam Bede -- Dystopia and the frustration of agency in the double Bildungsroman of The mill on the floss -- Abjection and exile in Silas Marner -- Justice and feminist Utopia in Romola -- Radicalism as Utopianism in Felix Holt, the radical -- The pursuit of what is good: Utopian impulses in Middlemarch -- Nationalism and multiculturalism: shaping the future as transformative Utopia in Daniel Deronda. / Within a framework based on Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, this thesis investigates how Utopian impulses are manifested in George Eliot's novels. Eliot's utopianism is presented first by a critique of dystopian elements in society and later by placing such elements in a dialogic relationship with utopian ideas articulated by leading characters. Each novel includes characters who are abjected because they have different ideas from the social norms, and such characters are silenced and expelled because society evaluates these differences in terms of its gender, class and racial prejudices. Dystopia is thus constituted as a resolution of the conflict between individual and society by the imposition of monologic values. Dialogic possibilities are explored by patterned character configurations and by the cultivation of ironical narrators' voices which enfold character focalization within strategic deployment of free indirect discourse. -- Eliot's early works, from Scenes of Clerical Life to Silas Marner, focus their dystopian elements as a critique of a monologic British society intolerant of multiple consciousnesses, and which consigns "other" voices to abjection and thereby precludes social progress by rejecting these "other" voices. In her later novels, from Romola to Daniel Deronda, Eliot presents concrete model utopian societies that foreshadow progressive changes to the depicted, existing society. Such an imagined society incorporates different consciousnesses and hence admits abject characters, who otherwise would have been regarded as merely transgressive, and thus silenced or eliminated. Abjected characters in Eliot's fiction tend also to be utopists, and hence have potential for positively transforming the world. Where they are depicted as gaining agency, they also in actuality or by implication bring about change in society, the nation and the wider world. -- An underlying assumption is that history can be changed for the better, so that utopian ideals can be actualized by means of human agency rather than by attributing teleological processes to supernatural forces. When a protagonist's utopian impulses fail, it is both because of dystopian elements of society and because of individual human weaknesses. In arguably her most utopian works, Romola and Daniel Deronda, Eliot creates ideal protagonists, one of whom remains in the domestic sphere because of gender, and another who is (albeit voluntarily) removed from British society because of his race/class. However, Romola can be seen as envisaging a basis for female advancement to public life, while Daniel Deronda suggests a new world order through a nationalism grounded in multiculturalism and a global utopianism. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / v, 270 p

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2007. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-214). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Western Australia, 2005. / No abstract supplied.