ed. Johannes D. Kaminski
The utopian appeal of peace, both in a political and spiritual sense, belongs to the powerful drivers of the human imagination. Yet the rhetorics of peace are difficult to untangle from the realities of war; after all, efforts that supposedly serve a higher purpose frequently result in injustice and violence. In the present issue, an international group of scholars discusses European, American, and Chinese texts that cover a wide spectrum of imagined peace, ranging from naïve enthusiasm for top-down solutions to dejected elegies for the demise of civil liberties.
The journal was published within the project SASPRO World Government: Grand Narratives in Contemporary Science-Fiction.
World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 24 €
Articles:
ALEXIS SHOTWELL
“All we have is means”: Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopianism as ongoingness
KILIAN JÖRG
Messy utopianism and the question of war: What does “staying with the trouble” mean in relation to war?
JOHANNES D. KAMINSKI
World-wide conflicts, insular solutions: Universalizing government, language and race in
H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia and Kang Youwei’s The Great Unity
GABRIEL F. Y. TSANG
Mind and peace: The “democratic” info-technological determinism of Gu Junzheng’s “The Dream of Peace”
MICHAEL KA-CHI CHEUK
The Chinese Nobel complex and peacebuilding: Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan as case studies
CATHERINE MACMILLAN
Everyone’s watching you: The future of society in Dave Eggers’s The Every
ANTON MATEJICKA
Totalitarian systems and their peaceful alternatives in Karin Boye’s Kallocain and Olga Ravn’s The Employees
MAGDALENA MÜHLBÖCK
The terrible within the peaceful: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara
ADAM ŠKROVAN
The pursuit of harmony: Groups and communities in post-apocalyptic narratives
ELAHEH KARIMI RIABI
The image of Persian women in Lomnitsky’s travelogue Persia and Persians
The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.