ABSTRACT
John Holloway does not quote Cohen or what the Baptist minister said about Blake, but he works with a similar idea. Reading utopian fiction can produce a dissonance in what had seemed obvious and inevitable. Reading utopian fiction may play a small part in such an education, in the teaching of a counter-hegemonic desire. If hegemony has an ‘educative’ effect, then counter-hegemony must work in much the same way. Reading utopian fiction may play a small part in such an education, in the teaching of a counter-hegemonic desire. It may dislodge our usual complicity with the seeming inevitability of everyday life, making the familiar appear strange, the obvious not so self-evident and the conventional no longer allowed to masquerade convincingly as the natural and the normal.
