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

这个项目探讨了自19世纪后期以来，小说是如何被用来想象更好的社区形式的，以及这种尝试所揭示的问题和机会。这项研究的见解被当地社区所采用，因为乌托邦的想象被利用来帮助实现积极的、与可持续发展相关的变化。虽然环境危机、叙事与认知的关系、乌托邦的概念等问题是学术界公认的话题，但它们往往是孤立地处理的。评论家们也倾向于坚持既定的时期和类型的界限，比如那些将19世纪的浪漫小说与20世纪早期的现代主义小说或20世纪晚期的科幻小说区分开来的界限。然而，这个项目通过四位作家的作品发现了基本的连续性，他们跨越了这些类别：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，分析一个共同的原子化社区和环境破坏的历史，是如何促使四位作家利用这部小说尝试并找出共同生活的替代方式的。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亮点，而且使问题更加清晰，这些问题将成为未来任何尝试构想更好的社区形式的核心。最近的生态批评开始关注在表现跨越个人和社区、地方和全球的全球环境危机方面的困难。类似的规模问题一直是乌托邦研究长期关注的问题，尽管与这种环境背景无关。与此同时，研究叙事表征本质的研究人员利用认知科学来促进我们对文学潜力和局限性的理解。这个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，如何反复遇到规模、认知和表征的问题。它认为，这种乌托邦式的冲动——无论多么有条件或令人沮丧——超越了文学研究的既定范畴，将各种各样的非现实主义小说（如浪漫小说、现代主义小说和科幻小说）汇集在一起，并要求我们重新考虑我们如何试图改变现状，以及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一个重要的新专著分享，在奖励期间完成。这将建立在已经发表在主要期刊和编辑的书籍上的研究，以及在奖学金期间准备的一篇新文章的基础上。这些研究理念还将推动一个社区参与项目“未来盛宴”，在这个项目中，人们聚集在一起举办一系列乌托邦盛宴，并听取可持续能源、食品、建筑和设计方面的专家的意见。这些活动将利用面向未来的叙述的力量，帮助社区向目前更可持续的行为过渡。有关节日的多媒体报道将在专门设计的网页上更广泛地传播；这次活动将产生一篇进一步的文章，因为我与一个研究援助机构合作，将参与者对乌托邦叙事的不断变化的理解与对这种类型的既定描述进行比较。该奖学金的主要思想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；并在“想象未来社区”的国际研究研讨会上与来自不同学科的从业者和学者合作。正在进行的研究也将在主要会议上发表，帮助建立一个国际学者网络，这些学者关注美好未来社会的设想与现实之间的联系。

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.