Not Yet - by Jamie Owen Daniel & Tom Moylan (Paperback)

About the Book

The essays gathered here recommend the work of Ernest Bloch as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation and give specific examples of how Bloch's work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism, collective memory, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life.

Book Synopsis

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is now recognized as a philosopher and cultural critic of the greatest importance, his subtle and profound developments of utopian Marxism as influential for the student New Left of the 1960s and 1970s as they were for the leftist movements of the twenties. Today, in the United States and Britain, his enormous body of work is attracting new generations of readers: more translations are appearing, and his utopian thought is finding a new resonance in many different contexts.

Several of the authors here address the centrality of a radically unconventional concept of utopia to Bloch's thought; others write on the question of memory and pedagogical theory. There is a Blochian reading of crime fiction, illuminating overviews of Bloch's work and an exploration of the stylistics of hope in Bloch's Spuren, as well as a translation of excerpts from that extraordinary book.

The essays gathered here are intended, above all, to recommend Bloch's work as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation, and to give specific examples of how that work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism and collective memory, the liberatory content of popular cultural forms, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life. Together they provide a timely introduction to one of the most untimely and inspiring thinkers of the twentieth century.

Review Quotes

"This is a book I have been waiting for for years ... Bloch speaks to the dilemmas of our time and is a thinker we very much need."--Angelika Bammer, Associate Professor, The Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University

"Not Yet brings together Bloch scholars of first rank and provides a coherent picture of a multi-faceted writer."--Lyman Tower Sargent, Professor and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-St Louis

"This pioneering work is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of utopia and memory at a time when the very notion of history is under siege."--Richard Kearney, Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin and Boston College