Literary Utopias and the Contemporary on Obsolence, Turbulence and Obscurity
Literary Utopias and the Contemporary on Obsolence, Turbulence and Obscurity

Summary/Abstract: It is highly common for a literary work to build a world and at the same time to discreetly, yet firmly, suggest its exclusiveness. Yet, unlike the so-called pure fiction, a literary utopia may be said to display some other world – still a fictive one, although no longer meant to temporarily extract readers from the real world: while trying to gain their interest, it also pressurizes them into keeping reality in mind. No utopian writer aims to banish reality. Quite the contrary, they keep their works highly permeable to the reality they are part of, and thus this genre may roughly be taken for a collection of comments on past or passing topical issues. The present paper explores the question of whether works illustrating the utopian sui generis literary genre live within the same parameters as works of unquestionable literariness or, on the contrary, their life runs risks – either of a different nature (as well) or simply bigger ones – in comparison to standard (from the generic point of view) literary fiction. In order to investigate this, each of the aspects announced in the subtitle is to be considered comparatively, within the general frame of literary fiction and in the particular case of literary utopia. All three are subsumed within the issue of legibility, and the comparative study of each is aimed at seeing whether in the equation of literary utopia's reception they act as variables undermined by more serious risks than within the reception of standard literary fiction.

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