Conclusion: Hic Sunt Dracones

Abstract

If the “map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at,” this does not mean that a properly mapped world with its duly noted utopias will solve all of our problems. Such maps ought to come with the warning, hic sunt dracones (“Here, there be dragons”), to those who would presume a complete knowledge of the mobile and protean spaces of the world system. Utopian mapping is necessarily fantastic, and literature offers perhaps the most effective form for envisioning the utopian project. The worldly otherworldliness of literature, the real-and-imaginary domain of dragons, characterizes the utopian cartography of the world system.