By returning to an origin, we can revivify the radical rhetoric of both word and genre, and rediscover its vibrancy in contemporary writing. Yet the silent erosion of the semantics of utopics by the political classes’ neo-liberal consensus can be exposed as precisely that if we return to More’s original text, and read through its structural complexities, its generic self-consciousness, and gain a sense of what Utopia is speaking. Similarly, the label “dystopian” has often been used to shut down the formal dialectic between text, world and reader. The cumulative consequences of the fall of the Berlin wall, the rise of religious fundamentalism, globalisation and the economic crisis have fuelled a Western intellectual scepticism about grand narratives and idealised political projects, and the post-nineteenth century meaning of “utopia” was discredited by both left and right. The adjective “utopian” became a term of approbation for the left and critique for the right. Sadly, the legacy of nineteenth-century Marxist readings of More’s work was to harness only the latter as though it existed autonomously of the dialogic work. More’s original contains what became staple conventions of Utopian content: travel in space and/or time a meeting with a stranger representation of the other as both familiar and strange a dialogue with the reader and the “blue-print” for the state of Utopia. It offers an open invitation to its reader to join in. “Utopia” necessitates and includes its opposites, others, contradictions. More’s “invention” of the utopian genre at a moment in history when exploration and communication first became global makes it a perfect prism through which to debate contemporary cultural and literary texts for students, at a time when the global consequences of that historical moment are coalescing in economic, political and environmental crisis. The semantic joke buried in the Greek meaning of Utopia (no-place) posits the self-consciously serio-comic enterprise as a literary and political thought-experiment in critical analysis of the present juxtaposed against imagined other(s). The dialogic frame in which the hypothetical place is imagined is “utopia”, and not the blueprint which is contained within the frame. “Utopia” thus has two originary meanings: More’s book and the island place. ![]() The second book consists solely of a detailed description of the politics and sociology of the island “Utopia”, by the stranger Hytholoadeus. More’s original consists of two books which act in juxtapositional dialogue: the first recounts discussions between More and friends about practical and philosophical political matters, including the topical issues of enclosures and Royal taxation. ![]() Thomas More’s Utopia will be five hundred years old in 2016, yet the genre and mode which he invented are repeatedly mis-prisioned as non-dynamic blueprints.
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