Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Softcover

Dekoven, Marianne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822332698 ISBN 13: 9780822332695

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Utopia Limited Details the end of the modern and the emergence of the postmodern in 1960s philosophy, literature and popular culture. This title argues that aspects of sixties radical politics and culture simultaneously embodied the full, final flowering of the modern and the beginning of the postmodern. Full description

About this title

Review:

“In a series of wrenching, heretical re-readings of its classics, Marianne DeKoven rescues the decade of the sixties from a false familiarity and restores a sense of its adventurous if fragile alliance between literature and theory, modernist utopian critique and the messy creativity of the postmodern present. Instead of the usual nostalgia and polemic, Utopia Limited delivers intellectual precision and tough love. The story of the sixties has never been told with more rigor or more freshness.”—Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress

“Marianne DeKoven has written a blueprint for how to delve deep into the sixties without romantic or cynical nostalgia. She recaptures fully that cultural moment by showing how sixties writers kept sliding back and forth between totalizing dreams of utopia and more private and diverse expressions of their wishes and identities.”—Ann Snitow, coeditor of The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation

“Utopia Limited will set in place a new way of understanding the interface between social, cultural, and political impulses in the sixties. Its aim—and its success—is not simply to mark out what we can now see as the emergent postmodern in texts as diverse as The Port Huron Statement and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but to interpret, through attentive close readings, precisely how and where the modern and nascent postmodern are joined in such texts.”—Cora Kaplan, author of Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism

From the Author:

Marianne DeKoven is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism and A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing and the editor of Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0822332698
• ISBN 13: 9780822332695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384