Authors

Discussion

As Joshua Kotin points out in Utopias of One, utopian thinking has been plagued by an understanding of utopia as social critique. By analyzing utopias confined to one individual, Kotin suggests a shift of perspective that allows us to escape this paradigm. Approaching this problem from a slightly different angle, in my paper I examine Polish utopian writing from over a century ago, which shifts the temporality of the utopian impulse, rather than its scope. If utopia can be restricted to one, then it can also abandon the idea of future fulfillment as its only validation. True to its etymological origins, utopia can be non-topical; as I want to suggest, it can also be never-lasting, without abandoning fully the commitment to either past or future.

In my paper, I explore two short stories which are among Poland’s earliest science-fiction literature: Antoni Lange and Jadwiga Bohuszewiczowa imagined worlds where time is running backwards, and discussed technological progress in ways that go against notions of historical or civilizational progress. And yet, by keeping utopian political commitments, they offered ways of projecting an ideal world without reaching for the horizon of the distant future. By examining narratives that project such a limited notion of the future, I want to explore the potential of thinking productively about utopia and failure and retaining the possibility of political thinking even when hope for a lasting solution has been lost.