Abstract
Working with Fredric Jameson’s influential discussions of utopia and world literature, the essay suggests that the prospect of utopia is frightening and also possibly boring insofar as it threatens to drain away the already waning possibility of experience in a postmodern, globalized world. In this world, resentment of the present seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a fictitious past, underscoring the difficulty of conceptualizing new social, cultural, and economic arrangements. Viewing world literature as a possible source of a new utopian thought, a utopia unlimited to its contemporary dystopian guises, the essay retraces Jameson’s pronouncements on world literature as so many responses to the polycrisis of late capitalism. In this reading, difficulties of representation, the need for the collective, and the requirement to utilize the things that are already here emerge as the central concerns in Jameson’s work on literature and utopia. This enables the essay to posit the need to address the irreversibility of globalization moving forward.
Alt Text Acknowledgement
1
Recommended Citation
Jackson, Trevor.
"A Crisis for Utopia: Jameson, the Collective, and the Future of World Literature."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
27.3
(2025):
<https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.5296>
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