Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Diğer, ss.65-69, 2018
This project aims to demonstrate that utopian thinking is beyond any gender, race, age, color, nationality, and border limitations, and everybody can think of his/her utopian world regardless of place and time restrictions. Utopia as an organized concept encourages everybody to investigate the norms of organization and to discover ideal systems by which human lives could be made better. It is not easy, as Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent claim in The Utopia Reader, to consider all of the utopian works and thinking informing the genre today, but utopia began with the myth of Eden. The first utopian thought refers back to Plato whose Republic is one of the pioneering utopian works. Plato, in Republic, describes a model for an ideal world; however, it was not until the 1500s, when the term utopia was coined by Sir Thomas More in his work of the same name that illustrates a fictional society on a remote island in 1516. More sets his utopian world on an isolated island, but makes it contemporary with his own time. He depicts a society in which individual possession is revoked, education is for all, men and women are considered equally, and there are no limitations on religious practice. To think through utopian lens is a key political approach including a refusal to be confined by our current obsession with time and place in order to think of a world that maximises human flourishing.
The present volume offers a diagnosis of the present and future through the lens of utopia and by depicting the concept through the pen of writers from Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Iran, Italy, Romania, Turkey, UK, and USA. This call was seeking short fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and graphic fiction), poetry, short essays and works residing across/between utopia. Creative writing projects like ‘My Utopia’ can give us the chance to think and to write not only about the aforementioned issues, but also about a better future.
Ruzbeh Babaee, PhD.
University of Porto