Marianne DeKoven is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism and A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing and the editor of Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice.

“In a series of wrenching, heretical re-readings of its classics, Marianne DeKoven rescues the decade of the sixties from a false familiarity and restores a sense of its adventurous if fragile alliance between literature and theory, modernist utopian critique and the messy creativity of the postmodern present. Instead of the usual nostalgia and polemic, Utopia Limited delivers intellectual precision and tough love. The story of the sixties has never been told with more rigor or more freshness.”-Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress “Marianne DeKoven has written a blueprint for how to delve deep into the sixties without romantic or cynical nostalgia. She recaptures fully that cultural moment by showing how sixties writers kept sliding back and forth between totalizing dreams of utopia and more private and diverse expressions of their wishes and identities.”-Ann Snitow, coeditor of The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation “Utopia Limited will set in place a new way of understanding the interface between social, cultural, and political impulses in the sixties. Its aim-and its success-is not simply to mark out what we can now see as the emergent postmodern in texts as diverse as The Port Huron Statement and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but to interpret, through attentive close readings, precisely how and where the modern and nascent postmodern are joined in such texts.”-Cora Kaplan, author of Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism

• Preface ixAcknowledgments xviiI. Modern to Postmodern Introduction: Modern, Sixties, Postmodern 31. Modern to Postmodern in Herbert Marcuse 26II. Culture Industry to Popular Culture 2. Culture Industry to Popular Culture in Mythologies 573. Las Vegas Signs Taken for Wonders 724. Loathing and Learning in Las Vegas 865. Endnotes I: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 114III. Participatory Democracy to Postmodern Populism 6. Participatory Democracy in Port Huron 1237. Paradise Then 1438. William Burroughs: Any Number Can Play 1619. Endnotes II: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 183IV. Subject Politics 10. Politics of the Self 18911. Laing’s Politics of the Self 20012. Tell Me Lies about Vietnam 21013. Fire Next Time or Rainbow Sign 22814. Personal and Political 24915. Utopia Limited 270Conclusion: Post-Utopian Promise 288Notes 291Selected Annotated Bibliography Part 1. The Postmodern 323Part II. The Sixties 334Index 345

Marianne DeKoven is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism and A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing and the editor of Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice.

“In a series of wrenching, heretical re-readings of its classics, Marianne DeKoven rescues the decade of the sixties from a false familiarity and restores a sense of its adventurous if fragile alliance between literature and theory, modernist utopian critique and the messy creativity of the postmodern present. Instead of the usual nostalgia and polemic, Utopia Limited delivers intellectual precision and tough love. The story of the sixties has never been told with more rigor or more freshness.”-Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress “Marianne DeKoven has written a blueprint for how to delve deep into the sixties without romantic or cynical nostalgia. She recaptures fully that cultural moment by showing how sixties writers kept sliding back and forth between totalizing dreams of utopia and more private and diverse expressions of their wishes and identities.”-Ann Snitow, coeditor of The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation “Utopia Limited will set in place a new way of understanding the interface between social, cultural, and political impulses in the sixties. Its aim-and its success-is not simply to mark out what we can now see as the emergent postmodern in texts as diverse as The Port Huron Statement and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but to interpret, through attentive close readings, precisely how and where the modern and nascent postmodern are joined in such texts.”-Cora Kaplan, author of Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism

• Preface ixAcknowledgments xviiI. Modern to Postmodern Introduction: Modern, Sixties, Postmodern 31. Modern to Postmodern in Herbert Marcuse 26II. Culture Industry to Popular Culture 2. Culture Industry to Popular Culture in Mythologies 573. Las Vegas Signs Taken for Wonders 724. Loathing and Learning in Las Vegas 865. Endnotes I: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 114III. Participatory Democracy to Postmodern Populism 6. Participatory Democracy in Port Huron 1237. Paradise Then 1438. William Burroughs: Any Number Can Play 1619. Endnotes II: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 183IV. Subject Politics 10. Politics of the Self 18911. Laing’s Politics of the Self 20012. Tell Me Lies about Vietnam 21013. Fire Next Time or Rainbow Sign 22814. Personal and Political 24915. Utopia Limited 270Conclusion: Post-Utopian Promise 288Notes 291Selected Annotated Bibliography Part 1. The Postmodern 323Part II. The Sixties 334Index 345

Marianne DeKoven is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism and A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing and the editor of Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice.

“In a series of wrenching, heretical re-readings of its classics, Marianne DeKoven rescues the decade of the sixties from a false familiarity and restores a sense of its adventurous if fragile alliance between literature and theory, modernist utopian critique and the messy creativity of the postmodern present. Instead of the usual nostalgia and polemic, Utopia Limited delivers intellectual precision and tough love. The story of the sixties has never been told with more rigor or more freshness.”-Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress “Marianne DeKoven has written a blueprint for how to delve deep into the sixties without romantic or cynical nostalgia. She recaptures fully that cultural moment by showing how sixties writers kept sliding back and forth between totalizing dreams of utopia and more private and diverse expressions of their wishes and identities.”-Ann Snitow, coeditor of The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation “Utopia Limited will set in place a new way of understanding the interface between social, cultural, and political impulses in the sixties. Its aim-and its success-is not simply to mark out what we can now see as the emergent postmodern in texts as diverse as The Port Huron Statement and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but to interpret, through attentive close readings, precisely how and where the modern and nascent postmodern are joined in such texts.”-Cora Kaplan, author of Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism

• Preface ixAcknowledgments xviiI. Modern to Postmodern Introduction: Modern, Sixties, Postmodern 31. Modern to Postmodern in Herbert Marcuse 26II. Culture Industry to Popular Culture 2. Culture Industry to Popular Culture in Mythologies 573. Las Vegas Signs Taken for Wonders 724. Loathing and Learning in Las Vegas 865. Endnotes I: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 114III. Participatory Democracy to Postmodern Populism 6. Participatory Democracy in Port Huron 1237. Paradise Then 1438. William Burroughs: Any Number Can Play 1619. Endnotes II: Sixties, Avant-Garde, Popular Culture 183IV. Subject Politics 10. Politics of the Self 18911. Laing’s Politics of the Self 20012. Tell Me Lies about Vietnam 21013. Fire Next Time or Rainbow Sign 22814. Personal and Political 24915. Utopia Limited 270Conclusion: Post-Utopian Promise 288Notes 291Selected Annotated Bibliography Part 1. The Postmodern 323Part II. The Sixties 334Index 345