Utopia: between Eutopia and Outopia
Utopia: between Eutopia and Outopia

Summary/Abstract: The paper starts from the observation that Thomas More’s seminal work Utopia stands between two modal categories of fictional worlds, the possible and the impossible. On the textual level, the author is careful to comply with a convention of truthfulness in order to place Hythloday’s journey within the history and geography of the time. On the metatextual level, Thomas More uses names (toponyms and ethnonyms) as means of denying the empirical reality of Hythloday’s journey and emphasizing its satirical, self-critical nature, on the one hand, and its theoretical and intertextual dimension (the scholarly,witty dialogue with Plato, Erasmus and the whole humanist tradition), on the other hand. Thus while at the literal level, Utopia has a fictional ontological consistency that makes it a pragmatic utopia or, in other words, a eutopia, its truthfulness is undermined at the metadiscursive level by a witticism that is typical of the age of Early Modernity, to the extent that it changes from a suggestion of social reform into a chimera, namely an outopia.

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