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Enabling Dreams
Abstract
With reference to both religious and secular utopias and paradise stories, David
Boulton suggests that in a postmodern world which has abandoned absolutes
and grand narratives, literary utopias still have the power to inspire and motivate
when understood and interpreted as poetry before politics, and art before science.
Inspirational rather than instrumental, utopias offer us ‘enabling dreams’,
picturing a better world of the imagination, and motivating us to help build the
New Jerusalem.
Boulton suggests that in a postmodern world which has abandoned absolutes
and grand narratives, literary utopias still have the power to inspire and motivate
when understood and interpreted as poetry before politics, and art before science.
Inspirational rather than instrumental, utopias offer us ‘enabling dreams’,
picturing a better world of the imagination, and motivating us to help build the
New Jerusalem.