Teaching Utopia Matters from More, to Piercy and Atwood

Abstract

In 2016, Thomas More’s Utopia is 500 years old, a quin-centenary celebrated by innumerable articles, conferences and exhibitions.¹ However, the genre and mode which he invented continue to be repeatedly mis-prisioned as both static and finished (Eagleton 2015; Kumar 2010), and are substituted instead by apocalyptic and dystopian visions of the contemporary and near-future world(s).² The term ‘utopian’ is used often by contemporary cultural critics as a broad term of insult to apply to a pie-in-the-sky naive political blueprint, is opposed to the term ‘reality’, or to ‘the end of times’ in Slavoj Žižek’s terms (Zizek 2011). However, this mis-prisioning and death-knell of both the original and the genre depends on an over-literalised reading, one that blinds readers to the nuances of the narratorial process and places utopia as a discursive debate, not as a place: to ‘utopia’ as genre, not content.