Imagining Alternatives: Utopia, Community and the Novel, 1880-2015

想象另类：乌托邦、社区和小说，1880-2015

• 批准号: AH/P009026/1
• 负责人: David Sergeant
• 金额: $ 22.92万
• 依托单位: Plymouth University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2018 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FP009026%2F1
• 关键词: Imagining; Alternatives; Utopia; Community; Novel

This project explores how the novel has been used since the late nineteenth century to imagine better forms of community, and the problems and opportunities revealed by such attempts. Insights from this research are employed with local communities, as the utopian imagination is harnessed to help achieve positive, sustainability-related change in the present.While issues such as environmental crisis, the relation of narrative to cognition, and the idea of utopia are established topics in scholarship, they are still often handled in isolation. Critics have also tended to stick to established boundaries of period and genre, such as those which divide the nineteenth-century romance from the early twentieth-century modernist novel, or from late twentieth-century science-fiction. However, this project finds fundamental continuities through the work of four writers who span these categories: R. L. Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These continuities demand that we look beyond established disciplinary boundaries to analyse how a shared history of atomised communities and environmental destruction led all four writers to use the novel to try and work out alternative ways of living together. The shared problems and possible solutions they encountered not only shed new light on the history of the modern novel, but bring into clearer focus issues which will be central to any future attempts to conceive of better forms of community.Recent ecocriticism has begun to focus on the difficulties in representing a global environmental crisis that spans the individual and communal, local and global. Similar problems of scale have been a longstanding concern for utopian studies, though detached from this environmental context. Meanwhile, researchers investigating the nature of narrative representation have drawn on cognitive science to advance our understanding of the potential and limits of literature. This project fuses together insights from all these fields to trace how issues of scale, cognition and representation are repeatedly encountered by the four writers as they try to imagine more harmonious communities. It argues that this utopian impulse - however qualified or frustrated - overrides established categories of literary study, drawing together varied modes of non-realist fiction such as the romance, the modernist novel, and science-fiction, and demanding that we reconsider the relationship between how we go about trying to change the status quo, and how such changes are imagined and represented. The project's findings will be shared through a major new monograph, completed during the award period. This will build on research already published in major journals and edited books, and a new article prepared during the fellowship. The research ideas will also drive a community engagement project, 'Feast for the Future', in which people come together to hold a series of utopian feasts, with input from experts in sustainable energy, food, architecture and design. These events will harness the power of future-facing narratives to help communities transition to more sustainable behaviour in the present. Multi-media accounts of the Feasts will be disseminated more widely on purpose-built webpages; and the event will generate a further article as I work with a Research Assistance to compare participants' changing understanding of utopian narrative with established descriptions of the genre.The fellowship's key ideas will be discussed further at filmed public lectures connecting arts and sustainability communities in Plymouth; and with practitioners and academics from a variety of disciplines at an international research workshop on 'Imagining Future Communities'. Research in progress will also be presented at major conferences, helping develop an international network of scholars concerned with the link between the imagining of a better future community, and the realisation of one in the present.

该项目探讨了自十九世纪末以来如何使用小说来想象更好的社区形式，以及此类尝试所揭示的问题和机遇。这项研究的见解被应用于当地社区，利用乌托邦想象力来帮助实现当前与可持续发展相关的积极变革。虽然环境危机、叙事与认知的关系以及乌托邦理念等问题是学术界的既定主题，但它们仍然经常被孤立地处理。批评家也倾向于坚持既定的时期和类型界限，例如将十九世纪的浪漫小说与二十世纪初的现代主义小说或二十世纪末的科幻小说区分开来的界限。然而，该项目通过跨越这些类别的四位作家的作品找到了基本的连续性：R.L.史蒂文森、弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫、多丽丝·莱辛和金·斯坦利·罗宾逊。这些连续性要求我们超越既定的学科界限，来分析原子化社区和环境破坏的共同历史如何导致所有四位作家利用小说来尝试和找出共同生活的替代方式。他们遇到的共同问题和可能的解决方案不仅为现代小说的历史提供了新的线索，而且使问题变得更加清晰，这对于未来设想更好的社区形式的尝试至关重要。最近的生态批评已经开始关注代表跨越个人和社区、地方和全球的全球环境危机的困难。类似的规模问题一直是乌托邦研究长期关注的问题，尽管与环境背景无关。与此同时，研究叙事表征本质的研究人员利用认知科学来加深我们对文学潜力和局限性的理解。该项目融合了所有这些领域的见解，以追踪四位作家在试图想象更和谐的社区时如何反复遇到的规模、认知和表征问题。它认为，这种乌托邦冲动——无论是合格的还是受挫的——凌驾于文学研究的既定类别之上，将浪漫主义、现代主义小说和科幻小说等各种非现实主义小说模式汇集在一起​​，并要求我们重新考虑我们如何努力改变现状与如何想象和表现这种变化之间的关系。该项目的研究结果将通过在颁奖期间完成的一本重要的新专着来分享。这将建立在已在主要期刊和编辑书籍上发表的研究以及在奖学金期间准备的新文章的基础上。这些研究想法还将推动一个名为“未来盛宴”的社区参与项目，在该项目中，人们聚集在一起举办一系列乌托邦盛宴，并听取了可持续能源、食品、建筑和设计专家的意见。这些活动将利用面向未来的叙事的力量，帮助社区过渡到当前更可持续的行为。节日的多媒体账户将在专门网页上更广泛地传播；当我与研究助理合作时，该活动将产生进一步的文章，以比较参与者对乌托邦叙事不断变化的理解与对该类型的既定描述。该奖学金的关键想法将在普利茅斯连接艺术和可持续发展社区的公开讲座中进一步讨论；并与来自不同学科的从业者和学者一起参加“想象未来社区”国际研究研讨会。正在进行的研究也将在重要会议上展示，帮助建立一个国际学者网络，关注对更美好未来社区的想象与当前社区的实现之间的联系。

项目成果

Representing the Planet: Affect, Scale, and Utopia

代表地球：影响、规模和乌托邦

• DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8139267
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Novel
• 作者: Sergeant D

'Writing the Planet: Affect, Scale and Utopia.'

“书写地球：影响、规模和乌托邦。”

• 期刊: a Forum on Fiction
• 作者: David Sergeant

The Genre of the Near Future:

不久的将来的类型：

• DOI: 10.1215/00166928-7500990
• 发表时间: 2019
• 期刊: Genre
• 作者: Sergeant D

The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Climate, Retreat and Revolution

二十一世纪小说中的近期未来：气候、撤退和革命

• 发表时间: 2023
• 作者: Sergeant

'The Genre of the Near Future: Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140.'

“近未来的类型：金·斯坦利·罗宾逊的《纽约 2140》。”

• 期刊: Genre
• 作者: David Sergeant