The best of all impossible worlds: Toward a feminist poetics of Utopia

Kathy Acker, Barbara Kingsolver, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Sarah Schulman practice narrative strategies generative of possibility and its excess, hope. Possibility meets hope to produce moments articulated in the impossible words of utopian dreams. My study traces these moments and the ways in which Acker, Kingsolver, LeGuin, and Schulman experiment to find the language capable of articulating their visions of the future.;To begin to answer this question, I explore the ways in which Acker, Kingsolver, LeGuin, and Schulman imagine subjects whose speech produces moments interruptive of the powerful effects of languages that exclude them. I argue that these discursive moments, when read together, produce a rhetoric of the (im)possible.;As textual examples of what has yet to be, the projects of Acker, Kingsolver, LeGuin, and Schulman articulate the utopian potential of the practices known as deconstruction. That is, these writers invent subjects who interrupt cultural hierarchies, both discursive and non-discursive, by daring to express their desire.;Thus, Kathy Acker, Barbara Kingsolver, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Sarah Schulman re-model language by investigating the imagination as a heart-crossed textual field in order to chart the trajectories of their dreams. Following these trajectories, my study presents a heterogenous plan for the best of all impossible worlds: a feminist poetics of utopia.;In the context of various historical and cultural traditions of utopian thought, and in light of feminist re-readings of the process of signification organized around the insights of Julia Kristeva, I situate my question: how do feminist utopian discourses inform and transform the production of power?...