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"What her soul could imagine": envisioning human flourishing in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time
This paper examines the feminist utopian community of Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Employing Martha Nussbaum's concepts of the jjudicious reader" and the role that literary imagination can play in public life, I explore the success of this community in ter...
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| Format: | Printed Book |
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Contemporary Justice Review Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 25-38
2005
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| Accés en línia: | http://10.26.1.76/ks/001902.pdf |
| Sumari: | This paper examines the feminist utopian community of Mattapoisett in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Employing Martha Nussbaum's concepts of the jjudicious reader" and the role that literary imagination can play in public life, I explore the success of this community in terms of the human capabilities outlined in Nussbaum's Women and Human Development. I review these capabilities, emphasizing the key distinction this approach makes between human being as means to an end and human being as end in herself. I then ask: Has this fictional society achieved the conditions necessary for human flourishing? I argue that the opposition of a dystopian and utopian world in this novel asks the reader to imagine first a diminishing and then a flourishing of her own human capabilities and that, in this imagining, she gains essential insight in order to participate in debates surrounding social justice. |
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