Nineteenth-century utopianism and the American social imaginary
"[E]xplores 19th-century religious communalism in America including the Shaker, Oneidan, and Rappite societies, arguing the importance of this early American "utopianism" in the development of a uniquely heterogenous democracy. Although no Hawthornes or Goethes, Tolstoys or Marxes emerged from the ranks of these communities, the aforementioned writers are only a few influential individuals who took an intense interest in them as potential models for large-scale societies. Recent social thinkers like Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor and Robert Wuthnow emphasize the significance of discourses (familial, dynastic, religious) in the creation of community. They contend that literary analysis in particular is critical for understanding how "social imaginaries" develop, sustain themselves, and transform. Among a variety of influential thinkers including Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Richard Dawkins, Goethe is a major contributor to the discussion, not simply because of his profound international influence during the period, but because he was a contemporary witness to these events, and, in his later life, was consumed by everything American in what Fritz Strich describes as the "stupendous study Goethe made of the new world, its geological, climatic, social, economic and political conditions." Goethe's final novel Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years depicts an emigrant society about to found an intentional community in America and his view of cultural metamorphosis is central to understanding social development of the period. Utilizing a theoretical framework that draws on Lacan, the Frankfurt School, and post-structuralist Marxist thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Slavoc Zizek, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, to show how communities develop within specific discursive structures and how these uniquely American structures have the potential to create more radical democracies"--
