In Our Time11 Mar 2005

Modernist Utopias

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the mad, bad world of modern utopias. "I want to gather together about twenty souls," wrote D H Lawrence in 1915, "and sail away from this world of war and squalor and find a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as necessaries of life go, and some real decency". Utopias were in the air in the first decades of the 20th century and the literature of the period abounds with worlds of imagined escape, feminist utopias, technological nightmares and rich imaginings of the world as it could or should become. Many of the societies that writers like H G Wells created were meant seriously, as signposts to a future that would seem horrific to us now, where the weak are eradicated and the strong prosper and procreate.What was it about that era that brought forward so many imagined futures? How did utopias become the dystopias of Brave New World and 1984, and why are writers so much less likely to create a Utopia now?With John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, Oxford University and editor of The Faber Book of Utopias; Steve Connor, Professor of Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London; Laura Marcus, Professor of English, University of Sussex.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1092)

Joseph Roth

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German s...

4 Jun 55min

Cybernetics

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerge...

28 Mai 52min

Indian Indentured Labour

Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labour...

21 Mai 51min

M.C. Escher

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geom...

14 Mai 55min

Handel's Messiah

Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Test...

7 Mai 54min

The Spanish-American War 1898

Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a sign...

30 Apr 55min

Silicon

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being...

23 Apr 52min

Dadaism

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emm...

16 Apr 50min