ABSTRACT
Before the neologisms that grew from the textual inventions of modernity, the world had been home to enough hunger, oppression, violence, suffering, and destruction to warrant creative and critical responses that opposed things as they were and tried as well to imagine a better way. Krishan Kumar might be right in his characterization of the "mocking, contrary, echo" of Anti-Utopia as it stalks Utopia, yet there is always the material situation that precedes and informs the conflict of this antinomic pair, for the whole contest of Utopia and Anti-Utopia rests upon the cold substance of a world that has never known a Golden Age, never discovered a Garden of Eden or a Blessed Isle. The dystopian maneuver has therefore kept utopian hope alive by exposing the authoritarian state and the capitalist economy but also by taking on the compromises found within utopian dreaming and actual opposition, even in and after whatever it is that passes for the revolutionary moment.
