Anahid Nersessian

Utopia, Limited: Romanticism and Adjustment Anahid Nersessian

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Review Quotes: "Utopia, Limited" is an exciting, provocative, truly exuberant work of literary philosophy. It speaks to romanticists, philosophers, theorists of affect, the secular, the ordinary all those who have been thinking modernity, the supposedly post-human, the now, the future, the future-of-the-now. Brilliantly activating Romanticism as adjustment, Nersessian salutes not the best but the better a better imaginable precisely in relation to "this" world, not a negation of this world but an improvement on it. This is a work of sustained inquiry and transvaluation, such that utopia, limited emerges as a positive space of potential flourishing, of actually livable minimal adjustment; such that bad taste comes to look like an express route to generative utopian thinking, living, and feeling; such that secularism becomes a possible resource for art and beauty, not its death-knell. Nersessian aims to re-invent, or at least extend, our vocabularies: she succeeds.--Maureen N. McLane, New York University"Review Quotes: Lively, learned, and subtle, "Utopia, Limited" may well help initiate a resurgence in the teaching and study of Romanticism.--Mark Edmundson, University Professor, University of VirginiaPublisher Marketing: What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve? Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind that ideal. In Utopia, Limited "she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian s theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had. For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the Romantics thought about aesthetics as a way to bind and thereby emancipate human political potential within a finite space. Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited" lays out a program of adjustment that applies the lessons of art to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map through a restricted future."

Contributor Bio:  Nersessian, Anahid Anahid Nersessian is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.