Utopianism

1516

eutopia outopia

: eu good : ou no-

Plato’s The Republic (Politeia) 4th c. BC

Golden Age myths: Hesiod, Works and Days (7th c. BC)

They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. (Isaiah 2:4)

• fairy tales, Cokayne, Wonderland, Schlaraffenland

• Pieter Brueghel the Elder, "The Land of Cockaigne," 1567

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977)• The Principle of Hope

(written from 1938 till 1950s)

• utopia as part of human nature

• utopian thought: tendency to think in alternatives

• utopia is innate to man (wishing nature of man – fundamental aspect of being human: to measure life ‘as it is’ by a life ’as it should be’)

Utopianism

• communities (utopian practice)

• ideologies (social theory)

• literary representations

Fátima Vieira: The concept of utopia

• (1) the content of the imagined society (opposition to present)

• (2) the literary form

• (3) the function - blueprint utopianism

• (4) desire for a better life (attitude - hope)dynamism of social sciences

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-pgHlB8QdQ

In Gregory Claeys (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. CUP, 2010.

utopian societies (real / fictional)

• monasticism • hippies, eco-villages• communism? nazism?

• Robert Owen (1771-1858): New Harmony (Indiana)

• HP2 The Mirror of Erised

Albus Dumbledore: "Let me explain. The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is, he would look into it and see himself exactly as he is. Does that help?"Harry Potter: "It shows us what we want… whatever we want…"Albus Dumbledore: "Yes and no. It shows us nothing more or less

than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts.„

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn7cR_8_vAg

Utopia as a literary genre

• journey – guided tour– nonexistent place or time– device of displacement - isolation

• dynamic by essenceyet as a construction often staticmodel as frozen image

• focuses on everyday life as well as economic, political and social questions

• the other world: (ironic) counterpart of our own

• not about a journey (or the future)(not reality but possibility)

More: dialogue + descriptive fictionlater: action – more complex plot → novel

• Exemplary utopian pattern conventions of travel literaturecorrespondance to empirical (extratextual) realityboundary between reality and fiction

Literary utopias• 4th c. BC Plato, The Republic• 1516            Thomas More, Utopia • 1627            Francis Bacon, New Atlantis• 1726            Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels• 1895            H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

1924            Evgeny Zamyatin, We• 1932            Aldous Huxley, Brave New World• ca. 1935 Sándor Szathmári: A Voyage to Kazohinia• 1949            George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four• 1962            Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

• Paralysis of utopian imagination in 20th c. disillusionment

• rejection of utopianism: anti-utopia

• dystopia flourishes

• POMO: rejection of grand narratives

Utopia - dystopia

• Contrast concepts getting their meaning and significance from their mutual differences

• Or: anti-utopia parasitical to utopia (copy, negative response)

• ”Utopia carried the function of anti-utopia as well: it presented the writer’s world negatively, as an anti-utopia, to which utopia is the constructive positive response”

Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1987, 124.

Utopianism functions like a microscope: by first isolating then magnifying aspects of existing, non-utopian societies allegedly needing drastic improvements, it enables us to see more clearly their political, economic, cultural and psychological mainstreams.

Segal, Howard. Utopias. A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012 (xi)