More Aer More Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia edited by ksenia olkusz michał kłosiński krzysztof m. maj FRONTIERS of NOWHERE More After More More After More Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia edited by Ksenia Olkusz, Michał Kłosiński Krzysztof M. Maj facta ficta research centre • kraków 2016 Some rights reserved by Facta Ficta Research Centre in Kraków The book is licenced under Creative Commons BY 4.0 (Attribution International) in recognition of Open Access Movement and stored in the Center for Open Science repository Reviewed by Prof. Paweł Frelik Proofread by Sven Dwulecki and Karolina Kwaśna Cataloguing: 1. Philosophy 2. Utopian studies 3. Utopia and dystopia I. Frontiers of Nowhere (vol. 1) II. Title III. Ksenia Olkusz, Michał Kłosiński, Krzysztof M. Maj ISBN: 978-83-942923-4-8 Cover photo: Nikos Patsiouris, Syros Island (https://www.flickr.com/photos/patsnik/16936623591) Set in Libre Baskerville and Cinzel open fonts Layout designed by Krzysztof M. Maj Contents List of Figures 10 Preface 12 Introduction: Utopia at 500 14 Gregory Claeys 1. Evantropia and Dysantropia: A Possible New Stage in the History of Utopias 26 Lucas Misseri 2. The Facets of “Universal Religion”: Religion in Nineteenth-Century French Utopian Thought 44 Tomasz Szymański 3. Twenty-first Century Critical Dystopias 56 Peter G. Stillman 4. Deconstructing Utopia 74 Krzysztof M. Maj 5. Micro-dystopias as Socio-political Constructs in Post-apocalyptic Narratives 90 Ksenia Olkusz 6. Boredom and Melancholy in Utopias and Dystopias 104 Mariusz Finkielsztein 7. Creating Utopian or Dystopian Worlds in Digital Games 118 Miłosz Markocki 8. SimCity: Where the City Ends 134 Michał Kłosiński 9. “Building the Future and Keeping the Past Alive Are One and the Same Thing”—A Rhetorical Analysis of the Metal Gear Solid Saga 148 Sven Dwulecki 10. Digging the Trench: Fictional Accounts of Utopian Communities and Utopian Closure 172 Verena Adamik 11. Classical Utopian Model. On the Melancholy Status of Jan Parandowski’s Ancient Discourse 188 Rafał Szczerbakiewicz 12. Parodies of Authority in the Soviet Anti-utopias from 1918-1930 210 Andrzej Dróżdż 13. The Analysis of the Element of Space in Negative Utopias by Antoni Lange, Jan Dobraczyński & Vladímir Páral 224 Aleksandra Paluch 14. Libertarian Utopia and Racist Dystopia: Social Commentary in Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold 238 Piotr Stasiewicz 15. No Light Without Shadow: The Control of Language and Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fiction 252 Anna De Vaul 16. Senescence in Young Adult Dystopias 266 Anna Bugajska 17. Modern Wastelands: The Psychogeographical Dystopia of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise 280 Marcin Tereszewski 18. The Use of Multimodal Narrative Techniques in Creating Dystopian Undertones Permeating David Foster Wallace’s Short Fiction 294 Maja Wojdyło 19. A Utopian, a Martyr or a Fool: Fictional Portrayals of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons and Wolf Hall 310 Barbara Klonowska 20. The Pelagian Roots of Utopia—The Problem of Good and Evil in the Novels Pronalazak Athanatika by Vladan Desnica and Koraljna vrata by Pavao Pavličić 322 Anna Boguska 21. The Elementary Particles: Brave New World According to Michel Houellebecq 338 Michał Palmowski 22. The Unusual Dystopia of Never Let Me Go (2010) 352 Eleni Varmazi 23. Transmetropolitan. Dystopia, Hyperbole, and the Superhero 364 Justyna Galant 24. Liberation, Redemption, Autonomy: Contemporary Utopias in Southern Italian Popular Music 376 Marcello Messina 25. Arnold Schoenberg’s Dodecaphonic Method as a Representation of an Artistic Utopia 394 Iwona Sowińska-Fruhtrunk 26. Space Utopia in the 1970s of the Twentieth Century on the Basis of the Kobaïan World 406 Łukasz Stec Contributors 420 List of Figures Table 1. Diachronic transformation of utopian goals 34 Table 2. Utopian and dystopian narratives juxtaposed with the logocentric instances 81 Preface The book More After More. Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia is the first volume of the new publishing series “Frontiers of Nowhere” designed by Facta Ficta Research Centre in Kraków (factaficta.org/en) to probe the boundaries of fictional world-building and contemporary narrative theo- ries. More After More summarizes also three years of His Master’s Voice research project run by the editors of this volume and featuring three conferences in utopian and dystopian studies (in 2014, 2015, 2016), supported by Jagiellonian University’s Faculty of Polish Studies as well as AGH University of Science and Technology’s Faculty of Humanities. In the special 2016 issue of the esteemed Utopian Studies journal, On the Commemoration of the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s “Utopia”, the project was recognized in the report Utopian Studies in Poland: A Preliminary Survey by a Prof. Artur Blaim from the University of Gdańsk, whom we would like to express our ma- ny thanks for such kind support. Additionally, our project has greatly benefited from help and guidance offered to us by Prof. Gregory Claeys, Prof. Anna Łebkowska, Prof. Barbara Gąciarz, Prof. Zbigniew Pasek and Dr Danuta Glondys. It is also the reviewer of the volume, Prof. Paweł Frelik, whom we owe our gratitude for taking care of high-quality, in-depth reviews of all chapters, which have greatly helped to deliver the very best value from the contributed manuscripts. Last but not least, those successes would not be possible without the attendees of His Master’s Voice annual conferences, whose promising presentations were selected for further development as chapters for More After More. Thank you all and also to those of you whom we could not have included in this short list—you really help us shaping a true brave new world in the contemporary humanities. The last edition of His Master’s Voice conference, More After More. Utopias & Dys- topias 1516-2016, as well as the publication of this book, were supported by Villa De- cius Association, greatly involved in a plethora of successful research projects part- nered with the Visegrad Group, as well as by Utopian Studies Society’s international preface 13 initiative “Utopia 500” (utopia500.net). We are proud to co-operate with people from both the academia and its outsides who support a community-driven spirit of re- search and work on transgressing the boundaries that lie foundations for walls and barriers—which are nothing but corner stones for future totalitarian dystopias and intellectual regimes. Correspondingly, More After More, as well as the series “Frontiers of Nowhere”, is meant to be published in full open access and distributed freely in multiformat, as we believe that the current model of high-cost (for publishers, authors, and readers alike) academic publishing creates a false sense of elitism by restricting the access to knowledge only to the affordable few. Utopian studies deprived of the openness are an unintended contradiction—they rather shape a dystopia by walling off from the outside and enjoying a splendid isolation for a small group of beneficiaries. We hope that this volume will grant the readers an insight to contemporary in- terdisciplinary research in utopian and dystopian studies across media, both in their philosophical and artistic dimension—and that it will inspire more research in this relatively small, but important branch of humanities. Editors introduction Utopia at 500 Gregory Claeys The little book we now familiarly refer to as Utopia was published five hundred years ago in Leuven, the capital of what is today the Flemish province of Brabant in Bel- gium1. As a work of fantasy it has had an astonishingly successful history. As both the no-place and the good-place, then eventually perhaps also the place-one-should- not-go, the dream which becomes a nightmare when we try to realise it, utopia has become inscribed in our vocabulary and our ideas. It means many things to many people, yet few would deny the power of the concept. So it is worth briefly revisiting just how this has mutated over the centuries. Firstly then to Sir (or Saint) Thomas and his ideas. The text is presented to us in the form of a dialogue in which the central narrative about the society called Utopia appears in Book Two, when the travels of Raphael Hythloday are related to a rather sceptical Thomas More. (But which, we immediately ask, is the real More in this schizophrenic division?). More commences Utopia with an account of the despera- tion of the poor in the England of his day, in Book One. We are quickly made aware by the mention of Amerigo Vespucci that recent travellers to the new world have brought back fantastic but compelling tales of their discoveries. Some hinted that conditions were akin to the golden age of Greek mythology, the very opposite, thus, 1 The substance of this introduction was presented at His Master’s Voice annual conference at the Villa Decius in Krakow in March 2016. I am grateful to Ksenia Olkusz, Michał Kłosiński and Krzysztof M. Maj in particular for their comments at this meeting. introduction: utopia at 500 15 of contemporary England. More would have known of Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s De Orbe Novo (1511), a description of the natives of Cuba as having community of goods, and there were other assorted rumours of this type. Few would today describe Uto- pia’s inhabitants as noble savages. But Utopia does appear to be just such a tale: it projects an island lying somewhere in the equatorial regions, founded both by ship- wreck and the wise design of the great mariner Utopus many centuries earlier. When we recall that Columbus thought the earthly paradise lay just beyond the mouth of the Orinoco river More’s postulate seems if anything less fantastic. The constitution and mores of Utopia appear to owe more to classical antiquity than to the customs of the aboriginal Americans.