Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming Berne and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. (pp. 345).

Utopia Method Vision makes a unique contribution to international debates in cultural, literary, sociological, and political studies of utopian theory, texts, and practices. The collection addresses the ways in which the international group of contributors approaches their study of the objects and practices of utopianism (understood as social anticipations and visions produced through texts and social experiments) and of how, in turn, those objects and practices have shaped their intellectual work in general and their research perspectives in particular. In so doing, each contributor develops a larger, self-critical look at the limits and potential of the entire paradigm by which utopianism is known, studied, critiqued, created, and received. Utopian projects seek, to use Seamus Heaney’s words, the rhyming of hope and history; but in existing societies, where hopes are abridged, baffled, or denied, the words merely alliterate. The orientation of hope is towards future plenitude, a prophetic imagining of alternative selves and societies. The contributors to this volume also see that time future is contained in time past and that coming events cast their shadows before them. One of the volume’s strengths is its focus on utopia as a process, as a means of both understanding the world and changing it. This work is splendidly interdisciplinary, international in its contributors and focus, theoretically accomplished, and analytically discerning. The essays are characterised by a productive transgression of discourses, genres, styles, and registers, as their authors reflect not only on utopia as method but also on the genesis of their own intellectual practice. In sum, they give us illuminating and moving expressions of the personal, intellectual, and political in a utopian key. – Professor Tadhg Foley, Department of English & Chair of the Board, Centre for Irish Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway To read Utopia Method Vision is to plunge into an exhilarating conversation. Writing from multiple disciplines and methodologies, the contributors share a common passion for a better world: a re-imagined political and social future. The essays are accessible and rich. They address a range of utopian objects, from Renaissance and enlightenment utopias to experimental poetry, from intentional communities to anti-globalization activism. The depth of theoretical sophistication will offer a new generation of scholars a foundation and inspiration for future work. Along with cutting-edge theory, the contributors offer stirring intellectual autobiography, tracing their evolution as utopian thinkers, activists, and participants in the field of utopian studies. The study and search for utopia is revealed as both personally and politically transformative. – Dr. Carrie Hintz, English Department, Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and President The Society for Utopian Studies