Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and Narrative ed. by Daniel Boscaljon (review)

Hope and the Longing for Utopia is Daniel Boscaljon’s second edited collection, following his earlier Resisting the Place of Belonging: Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative and the Arts (Routledge, 2013) and his solo-authored Vigilant Faith (University of Virginia Press, 2013), both of which I am now very excited to read! A welcome contribution to the postsecular discourse on utopian studies in the twenty-first century, the twelve interdisciplinary essays contained in this volume achieve what its editor sets out in the introduction: “contribute toward a revitalized sense of the potentiality of utopic thinking, one that grounds its hopes in an embrace of human fragility, failure and imperfection instead of striving for an unrealistic and unrealizable mode of certainty” (xvii). Largely emerging in response to the conference “Futures and Illusions” hosted at the University of Iowa in August 2012, Boscaljon’s book has brought together a number of wide-ranging and insightful scholars to contribute to the ever-growing body of literature on utopia at the intersection of theology and narrative studies.

Although the essays included in this volume are written with authority and clarity, their respective audiences will be limited at times. Boscaljon writes that the “diversity of materials analyzed and theorists described in this collection testifies to the universal importance of this discussion, and also offers readers a sense of how questions of hope and utopia permeate popular culture and critical thought” (xviii). And while he is correct in terms of the breadth of the discussion, the essays are primarily intended for advanced-level scholars in their respective areas of expertise. This primarily applies to part 2 of the book, “Historical and Literary Utopian Visions,” which Boscaljon writes moves “through a wide array of historical and cultural examples” to “illuminate the commonalities that bind questions of hope and utopia together, as each concrete existence shows how an actualized utopia inevitably disappoints” (xix). I personally did not find this to be the case, which is to say, a success; but this is not to the volume’s overall detriment. Ezra L. Plank’s essay on Calvin’s Geneva, Melissa Anne-Marie Curley’s reading of Japanese writer Miyazawa Kenji’s literature, Benjamin K. Hunnicutt’s discussion of Walter Kerr, and Everett Hamner’s essay on fear of actualized utopias in scifi cinema I found to be far too dispersed in terms of terrain covered and can be read at leisure or for illustrative purposes secondary to more theoretical points established in part 1, “Relating Hope and Utopia.”

By far the strongest and most effective essay in the first part of the book (and arguably the book in general) is Marybeth Baggett’s “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message.” Although the first two essays—Verna Ehret’s “Utopia and Narrative,” which examines the boundary between “overhumanization” and “hypertheism,” and Diana Fritz Cates’s “Hope, Hatred, and the Ambiguities of Utopic Longing,” which borrows significantly from the moral psychology of Thomas Aquinas (squaring with the volume’s theological interests)—effectively achieve the goals set out by Boscaljon, namely, to “connect hope and utopia, introducing many of the major tensions developed throughout the remainder of the book” (xviii), Baggett’s essay provides “a reading [of Utopia] untainted by the filter of the writing that follows in its wake, for,” the essay’s author notes, “such derivative work ultimately departs and detracts from More’s project” (41). Insofar as the volume is about framing utopia within the context of theology and narrative studies, Baggett’s argument that “in Utopia More has created, not an ideal community, but a transformative agent that, through careful reading, goads readers into self-examination, rooting out self-deception and correcting selfcentered impulses” (45) appropriately focuses the discussion between the key interests of the genre’s founder: religious faith and humanism.

Another important element of this volume that I found interesting and helpful was...