Utopian Genre Research Articles

From More’s Utopia to the Jesuit Reducciones in Paraguay

The author discusses the Utopian genre in both Spain and Latin America, arguing that some aspects of Utopia—its island form, its philosophical language, its disdain for gold—indicate that More knew certain Hispanic chroniclers and was at home in this genre’s natural tendency to interpret history in relation to Gospel teaching. A series of examples from Las Casas to Peramás reinforces the view that the Hispanic Utopia takes root principally in a program of political reforms on behalf of native Americans.

Resurveying Eden

Resurveying Eden

B. F. Skinner's utopian vision: behind and beyond walden two

This paper addresses B. F. Skinner's utopian vision for enhancing social justice and human well‐being as it was introduced in his 1948 novel, Walden Two. In the first part, we address the historical, intellectual, and social context that situates the book in the utopian genre, the critiques of its premises and practices, and the fate of intentional communities patterned on the book. In the second part, we review practices in Skinner's book that advance social justice and human well‐being under the themes of health, wealth, and wisdom, and then focus on contemporary practices that are the legacy of his vision. His vision was neither the a priori truth of a particular premise about human behavior or a necessary practice (blueprint) for an intentional community but rather the use of empirical methods to discover premises and practices that work to advance the health, wealth, and wisdom of individuals and survival of the culture.

The Bitter Product of Defeat? Reflections on Winstanley'sLaw of Freedom

The Law of Freedom in a Platform was Gerrard Winstanley's final published work. It appeared in February 1652, nearly two years after the dissolution of the ‘Digger’ commune in Surrey of which he had been the principal spokesperson. The book is said to differ markedly from his previous writings. In particular, his depiction of a disciplinary state apparatus is contrasted to his earlier rejection of state authority, and his appeal to a utopian legislator (Cromwell) is contrasted to his earlier emphasis on the self-emancipation of the poor. In accounting for this shift of position, commentators often refer to the ‘bitter’ experience of the Diggers' defeat. Confronted everywhere by ignorance and persecution, Winstanley came to realise that institutionalised discipline was required to counter human imperfection and that emancipation could only come from the top down. This paper questions such an argument. It suggests that in almost every respect The Law of Freedom remained consistent with Winstanley's other writings and that no transformation in his thought took place. What apparent differences there were stemmed from the challenges presented by the utopian genre, and the paper concludes by arguing that Winstanley's achievement lies in his having risen to these challenges.

La dimension utopique de la pastorale

This article attempts to show that the pastoral in music, presenting an ideal society, was part of the Utopian genre. The works played at the Académie Royale de Musique are placed in the context of 17th and 18th century agro-pastoral society, in order to show the implications of its topoi, representations of an ideal including references to the past, social criticism and the need to project oneself into the future. The naturally artistic shepherds, part of a closed world, figure an idyllic way of life and praise liberty in an egalitarian society. Their moral values, the source of their happiness, were opposed to the habits of the town and the court, shown as hypocritical and unjust. The subversive message was only limited by the need to include the monarch in the dream of peace. The élite pastoral brought to life a lastingly successful microcosm ; while revealing frustrations, its universe provided an optimistic message of confidence in human capacity to create happiness.

Animals, Extraterrestrial Life and Anthropocentrism in the Seventeenth Century

Both the issue of early modern attitudes toward animals and the early modern debate on the possibility of the existence of extraterrestrial life have received ample attention in early modern scholarship. However, almost no attention has been given to possible connections between these two issues. Such a connection nevertheless exists, since the early modern debates of both these issues were closely linked to the development of an anthropocentric outlook in western culture, according to which man had a God-given right to make use of nature. While the specific term 'anthropocentrism' was not in common use at the time, early modern thought, as discussed below, presents distinct phenomena which answer to the definition of this concept in its modern sense, i.e. a world-view placing man and human interests above those of the rest of the natural world. In the present article we shall therefore not be concerned with a separate discussion of the debate on the possibility of existence of other worlds and creatures on the one hand, and the debate on the status of animals and the possibility of moral duties toward them on the other. Rather, we shall centre on various cases where they were discussed in the same context, or on cases when the same person expressed distinct views on both these issues. As we shall see, there were many such cases, and their study has a profound influence on the understanding of early modern anthropocentrism. In the following discussion the connection between these two issues will be considered as a distinct phenomenon, sui generis in the history of ideas. Suffice it to say here, by way of introduction, that the rise of empirical science, particularly modern astronomy, gave an added impetus to speculations and debates on the possibility of the existence of other worlds and creatures, perhaps even rational creatures. As for the debate regarding animals, it fell broadly into two camps: on the one hand the theriophiles, who apportioned various degrees of feeling and rationality to animals (although usually less than human beings), and occasionally inferred from this a need for consideration toward them; and on the other hand the antitheriophiles, who denied or belittled the capacity for feeling and rationality in animals, and consequently also their right to moral consideration. Of particular importance in this context was the Cartesian theory of the 'beastmachine', which regarded animals as senseless automata. While Descartes himself remained rather agnostic toward this issue, certain of his followers developed more extreme variations of it, and the theory in general also bore the brunt of many theriophilic attacks.1IBefore discussing the literature on extraterrestrial life, one should mention some examples of a somewhat related type of literature, the Utopian genre. Indeed, the supposition of 'another place' always contained a potential for anti-anthropocentric argumentation, and of discussions of animals, albeit this potential did not always materialize. In Thomas More's Utopia (1516) most people eat animals, but the slaughtering of livestock is done by slaves, and ordinary people are not allowed to become accustomed to the cutting up of animals, since it tends to destroy the natural feelings of humanity. Hunting and hawking are also left to the slave-butchers. Hunting is regarded as the vilest department of butchery, since a butcher kills animals to satisfy a need, whereas a hunter does so for pleasure, exemplifying a blood-lust not found in any but the most savage animals. Hunting is a cruel sport and a stupid pleasure which should arouse pity rather than amusement. The Utopians also refrain from religious sacrifice of animals, believing that God would not enjoy slaughter and bloodshed. Some of the Utopians believe that animals have an immortal soul, although inferior to man's, and they generally believe that man's reason and intelligence is superior to that of the animals. As a child More himself did not seem to exemplify kindness toward animals, and even excelled in the cruel custom of cock-throwing. …

Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World

Preface. Introduction: Utopia, Themes and Variations. I: Before Utopia. Sources and Matrices. The Sources of Utopia: Ancient, Biblical, and Medieval. Traditions: Plato's Atlantis, the True Utopia. II: Other Worlds. The Blossoming of the Utopian Genre, from Thomas More to the Enlightenment. Utopia and the New World, 1500-1700. The City as Intellectual Exercise. Mundus novis and renovatio mundi. Messianic and Utopian Currents in the Indies of Castille. Utopia and the Reformation. Daniel Defoe and the Robinsonade. III: Utopia in History. From Revolutions to the First World War. Utopia and Revolutions. Fin-de-Siecle Landscape against a Background of Ruins. Socialism and Utopia. French Literature and Utopia in the Nineteenth Century. IV: Utopia and Dystopia in the Twentieth Century. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century. Communal Movements in the Twentieth Century. Avant-gardes and Utopia in the Twentieth Century. How Does it Look in Utopia?. Utopia and Totalitarianism. Utopia and the Late Twentieth Century. A View from North America. Utopia and the Philosophical Status of Edified Space. Concluding Essays. Symbolic Bankruptcy. Utopia Face to Face with its Representations. Society as Utopia

Utopia e... Amici e nemici del genere utopico nella letteratura francese (review)

REVIEWS 365 regicide would have received similar treatment earlier in the century). Sturm is keen to link Crébillon with Laclos and Sade in their portrayal of sexual exploiters . Although such comparisons can be useful, they seem to me to devalue Crébillon's own status and merits and, whether intentionally or not, tend to cast him in the role of precursor. (There is also perhaps the misleading implication that the eighteenth-century novel climaxes with Sade, an implication that neglects best-sellers such as Paul et Virginie.) Sturm's modestly priced study should therefore be approached as a stimulating introduction to Crébillon's work which supplies a series of general insights but does not delve thoroughly into individual texts and is hampered by the lack of an index. A comprehensive evaluation will have to await publication of the critical edition of the Œuvres complètes, under preparation at the Université de Grenoble. This will list re-editions and variants and, one hopes, provide fresh biographical information and thereby offer an opportunity unavailable at the moment. Simon Davies Queen's University of Belfast Nadia Minerva. Utopia e... Amici e nemici del genere utópico nella letteratura francese. Ravenna: Angelo Longo Editore. 245pp. £40.00. ISBN 88-8063-061-X. Nadia Minerva has brought to the attention of the reader different aspects and meanings of the Utopian genre in French literature, in the hope of clarifying some of the traditional questions surrounding the definition of the genre, its relationship to the dystopian discourse, and its evolution from what she justifiably considers the prototype—More's Utopia (1516). Her discussion opens with a survey of the French translators of Utopia. The subtitle, Friends and Enemies of the Utopian Genre in French Literature, well represents the heterogeneous content of the book. She underlines the ideological meaning that More's Utopia acquired for the French from the very beginning. The first translator, Jehan Le Blond (1550), shortly followed by an imitator, Barthélémy Aneau (1559), suppressed the expression "nee minus salutaris quam festivus" (not less useful than entertaining), which is how More himself described his book. In the eighteenth century, especially during the French Revolution, More's Utopia even more decidedly played the role of a political model. The best example would be Thomas Rousseau, who in his preface wrote: "Tous les hommes paraissent vouloir faire en ce moment quelques pas vers le bonheur ... chacun veut être politique , réformateur, législateur" (p. 23). He added that each politician ought to know More's book by heart (posséder par cœur), updating it in order to fulfil the political agenda of the French revolutionaries. 366 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 The second section of the first chapter deals with a genre defined as "microutopie ," a Utopian fragment contained in a longer work of fiction. Among the examples discussed, Minerva includes Marivaux's Effets surprenants de la sympathie (1793), Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), and Prévost's Cleveland (1732-39). In each instance the author identifies the section that responds to the Utopian genre, although the larger work, as in the case of Cleveland, criticizes the Utopian genre. The most complete discussion of the "microutopie " is reserved for Voltaire's Candide, in which the author, following earlier interpretations—duly acknowledged, particularly Jean-Michel Racault's L'Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre 1675-1761 (1991)—identifies three "micro-utopies": the Eldorado, the farm in Asia, and the castle of Thunderten -tronckh. The second chapter studies the analogies and differences between the Utopian genre and the imaginary voyages. Although preceded by fundamental studies (also duly acknowledged by the author), such as Raymond Trousson's Voyages aux Pays de Nulle part (1975), Minerva's discussion is well informed and at times illuminating. Probably one of the best sections of the book, this chapter exhibits some inevitable shortcomings. In order to explain the characteristics of the French Utopia, examples which do not belong to this genre are utilized : More's Utopia, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and the robinsonnades, ancient maps and charts, Columbus and other Spanish and Portuguese explorers of the sixteenth century. The difficulty facing the author is understandable. Having decided to...

Poetry, the University, and the Culture of Distraction

Poetry, the University, and the Culture of Distraction Jonathan Monroe (bio) Any discussion of community would do well to start with the idea of institution rather than association. For the rules of our associations, one on one or one with many, are fundamentally an institutional matter. . . . Poetry is (or can be) an aversion of community in pursuit of new constellations of relationship. —Charles Bernstein, “Community and the Individual Talent” There was the shield of another language transient enclosure/gate swings open shut shut . . . —Ann Lauterbach, “In the Museum of the Word (Henri Matisse)” A Critic came to me and asked, What is language writing? fetching it to me with full hands. I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, sprouting alike in prose and verse, in love-sighs and guerilla acting-out from under administered language deep in a million Broca’s areas as told to any one tongue. —Bob Perelman, “An Alphabet of Literary Criticism” Poetry: an alternate, less linear logic. —Rosmarie Waldrop, Lawn of Excluded Middle The current issue of Diacritics—the first in the journal’s twenty-five-year history devoted entirely to contemporary poetry—draws on presentations from two events I organized at Cornell in the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995: the first an afternoon symposium bearing the issue’s title, the second a three-day conference entitled “Past, Present, Future Tense.” 1 The issue’s primary intent is both to engage and enact contemporary poetry’s current relation to theory and the project of learning, in the apt inflection of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “Manifests,” how to read and write “otherhow” [36]. Such a project is aligned in fundamental ways with what Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman have termed [End Page 3] respectively “anti-absorptive” or “over-genred” writing [AP passim; MP 10], writing that is intimately bound up with the history of what I have called elsewhere the “heteroglossic, hybrid, antigeneric” impulses of the prose poem, that “genreless genre” which announced itself in the writings of Friedrich Schlegel and Charles Baudelaire [PO 334, 31]. 2 As a “critical, self-critical, utopian genre, a genre that tests the limits of genre” [PO 16], the prose poem enacted from the outset in its very self-definition the inseparability of the how and the what of any poem, text, or utterance. In so doing, it announced as well an urgent need for poetry to reach beyond “itself” to a richer engagement with philosophical, social, historical, political, and other concerns. In keeping with this tradition, the antigeneric, antiabsorptive, overgenred kinds of writing that have come into prominence over the past two decades—often though by no means always associated with the names language writing or language poetry—have revitalized important questions concerning contemporary poetry’s relation to questions of community, interdiscursivity, normativity, interdisciplinarity, and the international, multicultural, multilingual forces that have increasingly come to shape the cultural role of the university in the 1990s. In the context of what I am calling the culture of distraction, 3 recent antigeneric texts share an understanding that innovations at the level of formal syntactics may have an antinormative force at least equal to if not greater than that of texts that count on having their effects through even the most polemical contentual stances articulated in more normative, instrumentalized modes. Poetries/Philosophies/Languages/Communities The poet’s mind when writing poetry is a mass of social individuals all using words at different times. —Bob Perelman, “Chapters of Verse” This is my resume. Hire me. I am from January, where the winds are severe. I am an immigrant from evening, hire me. My father was a sweeper of secrets, a silk merchant in Vienna, he had no boots, he had no lotion for his skin. Hire me. This handkerchief is woven from ninety percent. My daughters are in Mexico on a jaunt. They have not read of the insurrection, they do not get CNN. This is my black scarf. This is my painting of a jar. Hire me. This is a photo of my husband [End Page 4] taken when he was a young man in jail. . . . Hire me. I am what you do not know and will not miss. . . . . . . We...

Andrei Platonov: Uncertainties of Spirit

Preface List of abbreviations Introduction: the problem of reading Platonov 1. Consciousness and matter: Platonov in Voronezh and Tambov (1917-26) 2. Learning the language of being (1926-7) 3. Chevengur and the utopian genre 4. Platonov and the culture of the Five-Year Plan (1929-31) 5. 'Socialist Realist' Platonov (1934-51) Conclusion Notes Select bibliography Index.

The Utopian Dimension of Kafka's “In The Penal Colony”

“In the Penal Colony” incorporates the dilemma of Utopia expressed in a continuum from the Utopian spiritual longing to its material Dystopian realization and the Anti‐Utopian attempt to retreat from it. The spatial and temporal background of the story is portrayed as a movement from centrality and timelessness (Utopian) to peripherness and sequential time (Dystopian and Anti‐Utopian). The spiritually closed, homogeneous, and coherent Utopian world of the Old Commandant turns into Dystopian nightmare while being implemented by the machine and leads to a retreat to the Anti‐Utopian world of the colony.The “stranger,” the “guide” and the “common member,” representative figures of the Utopian genre, are projected into a Kafkaesque world as characterised by the stranger, explorer, officer, condemned man and soldier. Kafka's unique clustering of figures emphasises the Utopian dilemma. A feeling of anguish is expressed in the description of three meaningful moments of “silence,” placed at significant points within the structure and expressing the experience of “… guilt (that) is never to be doubted” in the Penal Colony.

The World a Department Store: Bradford Peck and the Utopian Endeavor

AS RECENT SCHOLARS OF UTOPIANISM HAVE DEMONSTRATED, A STUDY OF the late nineteenth-century utopian genre and its authors is predominantly a study of the impact of social change on middle-aged, middle-class Americans who felt like victims. Biographical profiles of utopian novelists compiled by Kenneth M. Roemer and Charles J. Rooney also note that the majority of authors advocated cooperative or collectivist ideas as an alternative to the competitive system, that they were engaged in a variety of reform efforts related to their utopian visions, and that their endeavors were accompanied by a mixture of disillusionment and hope, pessimism and optimism, faith and doubt. By connecting utopian thought to the realities of American life, such scholars have provided valuable insights into the nature of modern utopianism, particularly in suggesting its universality and practicality on the one hand, and its complexity and ambiguity on the other.' Bradford Peck (1853-1935), a Lewiston, Maine, self-made businessman, was in many ways representative of the more than one hundred men and women between 1888 and 1900 who wrote utopian novels expressing their discontent with America's present and elaborating their dreams for

Miguel Delibes' Parábola del náufrago: Utopia Redreamed

Delibes' anti-utopian novel is analyzed from a triple per­spective: its internal exegesis, the author's literary development, and the three-phase Utopian genre. Artistic versus thematic orien­tation is examined via parabolic technique, linguistic characteriza­tion, and Parábola's internalization as its author's nightmare. The latter facilitates novelistic exposition through the control and order inherent in the associative language and logic of the dream. Delibes frees his Utopian world from the perquisites of reality by creating an estetic dimension and psychological verisimilitude uncommon in the genre.

Bulgarin and the Development of the Russian Utopian Genre

Bulgarin and the Development of the Russian Utopian Genre