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  • IntroductionMarxism and Utopia . . . Again
  • Phillip E. Wegner (bio)

In 1976, the minnesota review published in issue 6 a section titled “Special Supplement: Marxism and Utopia,” put together by the Marxist Literary Group at the University of California, San Diego. The collection includes essays by Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin, Louis Marin (Jameson’s translation of Marin’s “Theses on Ideology and Utopia” appears in the issue but is not mentioned in the table of contents in print [3, 71–75]), Mark Poster, Stephen Eric Bronner, Jost Hermand, Jean Pfaelzer, Paul Buhle, and Serafina Bathrick. These were years of tremendous change in humanities scholarship and the university as a whole, with the political transformations of the 1960s still actively reverberating throughout the institution, the revolution called theory picking up steam, and scholarship becoming increasingly receptive to work in popular culture and so-called paraliterary practices. The essays in the minnesota review special supplement both reflect and further advance these transformations, addressing as they do an array of topics, including the meditations on utopia found in the work of Charles Fourier, Friedrich Engels, Ernst Bloch, and Bertolt Brecht; US utopian literature in the late nineteenth century; the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft; and the Vincente Minnelli film Meet Me in St. Louis. While engagements with these thinkers and texts have become commonplace today, there was in the mid-1970s still something novel and even transgressive about offering serious scholarly attention to them. A number of those involved in this inaugural collection would in the coming decades continue to develop the ideas they first broached here and would thereby help to transform our institutional and scholarly practices in significant ways.

All of the essays in the supplement make an impassioned appeal for Marxist scholarship to take up with renewed intensity the question of utopia. Such a call to action is most fully on display in the essay that opens the collection, Jameson’s “Introduction/Prospectus: To Reconsider the Relationship of Marxism to Utopian Thought” (1976). Jameson notes both a “revival of Utopian thinking in the West,” under way in this moment, as well as the increasing visibility of new utopian writings, “the latest being Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed” (54, 55). [End Page 57] Jameson then proceeds to outline two vital tasks for future work, drawing upon the insights of both Herbert Marcuse, his then colleague at the University of California, San Diego, and Ernst Bloch, two figures whom Jameson had earlier discussed in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971). The first task, which Jameson notes is primarily “of a critical and diagnostic nature,” would examine “the various ways in which our society represses, to use [Marcuse’s] expression, the Utopian principle and the Utopian imagination” (1976, 55). Even more significantly, Jameson follows Bloch’s lead and calls for further development of what he names “Utopian analysis or method, of the Utopian principle as a hermeneutic or technique of decipherment, in opposition to the examination of the content of individual Utopian visions, or that of the cultural diagnosis we outlined above” (56). Then, in a dress rehearsal of ideas he will expand three years later in his groundbreaking essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” underscoring the importance of Bloch’s insights for thinking in new ways about contemporary mass culture, Jameson concludes:

For Bloch’s work suggests that even a cultural product whose social function is that of distracting us can only realize that aim by fastening and harnessing our attention and imaginative energies in some positive way and by some type of genuine, albeit disguised and distorted, content. . . . To maintain that everything is “a figure of Hope” is to offer an analytical tool for detecting the presence of some Utopian content even within the most degraded and degrading type of commercial product.

(1976, 57–58)

The three essays that follow in this issue both acknowledge their immense debt to the pioneering efforts of the minnesota review collection and continue to develop the project its title announces. The essays in the collection, although brought together in an unexpected fashion—originally commissioned for another publication but collectively withdrawn by the authors in protest of the publication’s editorial...

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