This paper is divided into 1. Possible Worlds: An Approach Reading Doležel’s Heterocosmica; 2. Freedom as a Constituent and Horizon of Possible Worlds. Agreeing with Doležel’s formulation that fictional worlds of literature are incomplete, I proceed to plead for a semiotic pragmatics within a historical epistemology and to foreground the PW’s story, while doubting the usefulness of his modalities. Inescapably, a story and its PW need to be approached syntagmatically and paradigmatically (Jakobson). Part 2 aims to give some orienting suggestions about what does freedom do for understanding PWs, and what do PWs do for understanding freedom. The PWs of “word art” include a vision of limits, a possible self-rule within them; they are clearly and openly probes; and finally they are suffused with potential power and yet radical. As all arts, they are akin to phronesis, practical wisdom that discusses right choices – that is, freedom and creativity, Whitman’s “I was thinking the day most splendid, till I saw what the not-day exhibited”.

This invited article is a tribute to Giovanni Maniscalco Basile, reflecting on his multifaceted contributions as a scholar, and cultural enthusiast. Darko Suvin highlights Basile’s extensive work and interests spanning Russian politics and ideology, music, science fiction, and utopian studies. Suvin underscores Basile’s unique intellectual presence, likening him to a Renaissance man with a profound ability to interweave diverse fields. The article delves into Basile’s engagement with Russian utopian and dystopian literature, his polyglot abilities, and his critical approach to blending historical and futuristic narratives. Suvin discusses Basile’s role in elevating science fiction as a legitimate field of academic inquiry and his efforts in integrating it with contemporary cultural and political critiques. Marina Ciccarini further explores Basile’s life, and personal and professional background, emphasizing his broad interests, between literature, politics, music and physics, and eventually providing a selected bibliography of his works. In conclusion, the article portrays Giovanni Maniscalco Basile as a profound thinker whose interdisciplinary work continues to inspire discussions on creativity, freedom, and the intellectual’s role in society.

Utopia is endangered today! Such a sentence seems redundant: utopia—the shape of the possibility that things could be better—is always in danger. But the present danger is something distinct from the dangers that historically have attended utopia. These have not gone away but, added to them, and largely superseding utopia’s other perils in our twenty-first century, is the disappearance of utopianism from the culture and politics that dominate our collective sense of any future. Politically, this is a conscious and unconscious erasure serving the interests of ecocide and the present mass killings of poverty and declared or undeclared wars. Our axiom is that the unchecked drive for profits will necessarily continue serving such interests, so that we cannot take seriously either presumed new “green” interests as today enforced, or group “identities” unless they challenge that drive.The collection of essays that make up the following “bloc” contains an argument that there is a need, political and historical, to disentangle our understanding of antiutopianism today from the overt “anti-utopianisms” of previous epochs, giving weight if not shape to the Cold War identification of utopia with authoritarianism or uniformity under the fake sign of “totalitarianism.” Where such older predecessors still linger, they have been turned to face the past, as if those past models of tyranny themselves buried not just particular utopias but also the need for utopia. We now have antiutopianism as a thing in itself, antiutopianism without utopia. It deserves to be taken very seriously, without the hyphen.This argument was first put forward by Darko Suvin in the final essays of his most recent collection Disputing the Deluge (Bloomsbury, 2022). The editor of that collection, Hugh C. O’Connell, glossed Suvin’s use of the unhyphenated term “antiutopianism” as follows: “we might think of antiutopianism today as the blurring of the boundaries between a stalwart negation of all utopian thought . . . and the hallucinatory proclamations of the End of History accompanying the triumph of the global capitalist world system.”Following the release of Disputing the Deluge, Suvin took up a Visiting Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Research in Narrative, History and Memory. He developed the materials for a two-day workshop on antiutopianism in early April 2023. After conversation with Patricia McManus, that workshop was titled “Antiutopia as an Enforced Dominant Horizon of Mass Culture,” and it proposed to investigate the causes and consequences of this dominance for personality and utopianism today. It adopted the TV series Game of Thrones as its concrete exemplum. The first day of the workshop was introduced by Suvin’s presentation on the theory of antiutopia(nism), with a response by Antonis Balasopulos; the second day by McManus’s reading of Game of Thrones with a response by Lazar Atanasković. All of these presentations were rewritten for this volume of Utopian Studies. We were happy with the interest generated, which ran to over seventy registrants from all over the world.Suvin’s contribution, “On Antiutopianism in Pragmatics and Narrative,” sets the scene for the interventions that follow it. It engages with two aspects of our present in some detail, the self or woebegone “personality” of late or catastrophic capitalism, and the gathering signs of “neofeudalism,” possibly issuing into a Fascism 2.0, as a way of probing the historical horizon of this capitalism.In his response on the first day, “Antiutopianism, Social Darwinism, and Self-Preservation,” Balasopoulos picked up Suvin’s focusing on the “personality” in relation to both utopia and the bourgeois revolutions. That concept is here subjected to an analysis that traces its filiations with both Social Darwinist and Marxist conceptualizations of “survival.”The two essays from the second day of the workshop move from the explorations opened by Suvin and Balasopoulos to focus on analysing HBO’s hit TV series Game of Thrones. Following up a suggestion by Suvin, McManus makes the case for understanding the series as articulating antiutopianism and thriving on so doing. Atanasković, in “On the Antiutopian Effect in Game of Thrones,” examines the series’s use of an aesthetic of “Fantastic history,” and a mode of representation that is “eclectic” as it fragments history in the name of an ambiguous “realism.” He proposes also a hypothesis that the ideal reader of Game of Thrones is the class fraction of white-collar corporate employees.These four contributions are but the beginning of what we hope will be a longer project involving many more scholars of utopian studies. To this end we are thinking of a conference on antiutopianism, to be held in the early Spring of 2024. If it proves feasible, a call for papers will be forthcoming.

ABSTRACT This article refurbishes the view of antiutopianism as the ruling orthodoxy of late-capitalist common sense (pragmatics) and writings plus media (narrative). After a half-century descent into a contemporary neofeudalism (Fascism 2.0), the operation of totalized antiutopianism on utopian narrative genres is powerfully evident in the TV series Game of Thrones, a rigidly Social Darwinist fantasy world, reveling in mass slaughters and presupposing neofeudalism: a black fable for lesioned personalities.

By offering a reading of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and of the post-Aeschylus tradition of the myth of Prometheus which highlights its revisions as imagined by Karl Marx and Percy Shelley, among others, this paper seeks to explore how to grasp, amid our danger and despair, the prominent poetic and cognitive view of a similar cataclysm from the past, as a lesson to the present. The route to do so encompasses a revisitation of the connections between theatre and democracy in ancient Greece; a consideration of the variations of the themes of knowledge, injustice and tyranny, material civilization and its control and the unbowed personal will to resist oppression, all evoked by the myth of Prometheus; and teasing out the main lineaments of a meaning for the play for an endangered Athenian democracy, as staged around 440 as well as for authors who have recycled its main theme throughout centuries, and finally for us today. It ends by giving pride of place to a Promethean hope, a long hope, arisen from suffering and wedded to cognition, which has crossed centuries and reached our times in urgency. The work is, of course, a provisional statement: a contribution.

To understand some central presuppositions of Marx within an anti-scientistic and anti-bourgeois horizon, such as knowledge and freedom, some central elements within Leibniz and Spinosa are discussed, with a glance at Hegel. Capital turns out to be an anti-Leibnizian monad, while Das Kapital is undergirded by a Spinozist value-political treatise.

How do dominant epistemological frames create political understanding and violence in the public sphere and through cultural texts? This article explores a theoretical answer to this question by identifying narrative categories, or frames, that create shared realities and collective political understanding and action in contemporary antiutopian US culture. Much current public information is marred by the juxtaposition of fact and fiction, logic and emotion, creating forms of knowledge and thus political action not necessarily based, then, on actuality or a communal ethic of care. Through analysis of worlds made possible in science fiction, the author builds on his previous theoretical work to develop what he calls “a method for radical utopian cognition”—one that sees cultural cognition based in logic, emotions, and a utopian frame in which destiny or resolution is not dictated by class or preordained authorial expectation but is instead open for constructive possibilities and new realities through the presentation of alternative possible worlds.

Sledeći Hesiodov postupak razdvajanja dobre od loše Eride, u tri dela ovih Teza, komunizam, naučna fantastika i utopija/utopizam podeljeni su između dve krajnosti i tako ispitani. Kod naučne fantastike ponovo je razmotrena uloga začudnosti i novuma; oboje se sada posmatraju kao podložni nasrtljivoj obmani. Više je razrađen treći deo o dobrom i lošem utopizmu, sa raspravom o antiutopiji, definisanoj kao ciljana i otvoreno politička upotreba zatvorenog horizonta koja treba da opovrgne, izvrgne podsmehu i učini nezamislivom kako eutopiju nekog boljeg mogućeg sveta tako i distopiju. Entropijsko zatvaranje i rani Diznilend i diznifikacija ispituju se da bi se razumela antiutopija koja nas živi. Za razliku od svih ranijih verzija utopije/utopizma, ljudi su sada potpuno i trajno unutar ove lažne utopije. Teorija utopije/utopizma, koja aksiomatski postulira da utopije nisu ostvarljive, može se spasiti ako se pretpostavi da je eutopija u antiutopiji latentno prisutna kao sačinjeno odsustvo.

Critical QuarterlyVolume 62, Issue 1 p. 83-122 Criticism Words and lesions: epistemological reflections on violence and lessons of the 1968 moment (with particular reference to Japan) Darko Suvin, Corresponding Author Darko Suvin dsuvin@gmail.com 26, Addison Avenue, London, W11 4QRSearch for more papers by this author Darko Suvin, Corresponding Author Darko Suvin dsuvin@gmail.com 26, Addison Avenue, London, W11 4QRSearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 May 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12539Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume62, Issue1April 2020Pages 83-122 RelatedInformation

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was 'simultaneously dominator and dominated' (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential system, spacetime descriptions, and composition - 'the Winston story', the 'Goldstein excerpts', and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, 'Tory anarchist' stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell's view there are 'three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low', but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. 'No economics' entails here 'no class struggle', and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell's textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable 'totalitarianism'. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom.

This article is a series of passages meditating on a lifetime of memories about the recently deceased Predrag Matvejevic, as well as on some of his main writings and themes. Of the books discussed, the first, Prema novom kulturnom stvaralastvu - written in 1977 as a plea for a 'deviant' Left engagement in the wake of Krleza and Sartre, and for a cultural creativity in tandem with self-management - represents his polemical writing inside and for SFR Yugoslavia. The other titles are from his late phase: Breviario mediterraneo, Pane nostro and L'altra Venezia, with some mention also of Epistolario dell'altra Europa and Il mondo ex. Their examination leads to the conclusion that Matvejevic was not only a privileged witness and judge of Yugoslavia and the succeeding 'yugosphere', but also of the 'exes' or 'has-beens' like him and me left stranded and nostalgic by the fall of 'real socialism', the USSR and SFRY. If a classic is a creative force whose central works remain in the memory of generations to come, then we had in Matvejevic a classic (Yugoslav, Croatian, Bosnian, Yugospheric, and cosmopolitan) whom we did not appreciate in time. But a future poetic justice looking back at his times shall see them largely through his eyes.

I cannot review this book except in the first person singular, since it intersects with and is of great help to my longstanding efforts to draw a balance sheet of the communist movement, Marxism, a...

Poetry is approached as topological cognition, with its furthest horizon being communism. In alienated times, the poet-creator participates in politics as an antipolitics, by suturing conceptual thought to immediate sensual experiences. The author develops this horizon by emancipatory examples from Bertolt Brecht’s theory, Friedrich Hölderlin’s verse, and Franco Fortini’s criticism. From Arthur Rimbaud on poetry is freedom as possibility of things being otherwise, a swerve from and against the dominant lore.

The first Polish translation of one of the best-known articles on the poetics of science fiction, considered nowadays a must-read reference in the field. In this classical piece, Darko Suvin famously argues in favour of introducing the concept of cognitive estrangement modelled after Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie (often questionably rendered as defamiliarisation) as well as Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (as defined in his Kleines Organon für das Theater). Arguing, in due course, for acknowledging the cognitive and epistemological potential of thus defined estrangement, Suvin proceeds to introduce and analyse two distinct models for studying science fiction from both historical and formalist perspective—the extrapolative model and analogic model—which altogether help at outlining features of the most prototypal science fiction. This translation is also supplemented with an addendum from 2014 wherein the author revisits his thoughts from Marxist perspective and ponders on their relevance in reference to a more politically inclined debate in science fiction studies.

This article is a series of passages meditating on a lifetime of memories about the recently deceased Predrag Matvejević, as well as on some of his main writings and themes. Of the books discussed, the first, Prema novom kulturnom stvaralaštvu – written in 1977 as a plea for a “deviant” Left engagement in the wake of Krleža and Sartre, and for a cultural creativity in tandem with self-management – represents his polemical writing inside and for SFR Yugoslavia. The other titles are from his late phase: Breviario mediterraneo, Pane nostro and L’altra Venezia, with some mention also of Epistolario dell’altra Europa and Il mondo ex. Their examination leads to the conclusion that Matvejević was not only a privileged witness and judge of Yugoslavia and the succeeding 'yugosphere', but also of the 'exes' or 'has-beens' like him and me left stranded and nostalgic by the fall of 'real socialism' in the USSR and SFRY. If a classic is a creative force whose central works remain in the memory of generations to come, then we had in Matvejević a classic (Yugoslav, Croatian, Bosnian, Yugospheric, and cosmopolitan) whom we did not appreciate in time. But a future poetic justice looking back at his times shall see them largely through his eyes.

Only he who builds the future has a right to judge the past. (F. Nietzsche) Les choses pourraient etre autrement. [Things could be otherwise.] (R. Ruyer) We communists. … Or, in other words: we, fa...

Fascism is discussed as a pathology of masses under capitalism, and its components are defined. It was a class block between rulers and segments of the middle classes while neutralising the working classes and any deviant political forces by terror and ideology. Ultra-nationalism is presented as its key element, and minimum preconditions are identified. Economics and class regrouping, as well as profiting and hegemony in fascist states are stressed. A section approaches clerical fascism, and incidentally ‘Eastern Europe’. A brief Conclusion looks at current 'Fascism 2.0'. A lengthy select chronological bibliography on fascism with annotations is appended.