Consuming Utopia

Cultural Studies and the Politics of Reading
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-032-06728-5
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 130 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 213 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction (including dystopian and anti-utopian) from the critical perspective of cultural studies.

With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a ‘politics’, it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics.

An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate and Undergraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Storey, John

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaften Medienwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Mediensoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface; 1. Culture and power; 2. The utopian contrast; 3. Dystopian and anti-utopian fiction; 4. Textual politics; 5. Habitualization, defamiliarization, and utopian reading; 6. Reading and the education of discontent; Postscript; References

Über Autor(innen)

John Storey is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK, and Chair Professor of the Chang Jiang Scholar Programme, Shaanxi Normal University, China.