Hannah Rayner - Blog Post 8

By this time, you have written Short Paper 5 and formulated an Inquiry Question, and learned how to use the library databases to find a peer-reviewed article from an academic journal. Follow the steps, numbered.

1. First, write down your inquiry question.

How does the presence of a possible utopia function in popular dystopian fiction?

2.  Locate a peer reviewed article from an academic journal, using your SP5 Inquiry Question as a guide, and copy the citation here.

Webb, Darren. “Christian Hope and the Politics of Utopia”. Utopian Studies 19.1 (2008): 113–144. Web. 18 November 2015. 

3. Write a summary of the article below, 4-6 sentences long. Similar to your guidelines for Short Paper 1, the summary must (1) restate in your own words the content of the article, focusing on the central claim and the main points that support it. (2) The language of your summary should be independent of the original and contain few, if any, quotations. (3) The summary must be accurate and complete, communicating your understanding of the essay as a whole and its purpose. It should be understandable to a reader who is not already familiar with the article.

Darren Webb’s article “Christian Hope and the Politics of Utopia”, discusses the connection between utopia and hope.  He explains that the initial relationship between utopia and hope was born in the first utopian novel or Thomas More’s Utopia. Webb draws this conclusion by analyzing different philosophers’ ideas on hope including claims from Marcel, Moltmann, and Gutierrez.  More also uses the ideas from these scholars to explain what a Christian should hope for, such as the sympathy of God. Overall, Webb wrote this article in order to demonstrate the development and presence of hope in utopian novels. 

In one or two sentences, explain how this speaks to the issue your Inquiry Question explores.

This speaks to the issue in my Inquiry Question because it describes the function of utopias.  It describes how utopias are able to create hope.