Denying the contrary: More’s use of litotes in the <i>Utopia</i>

McCutcheon, Elizabeth

doi:10.3366/more.1971.8.3-4.14

Cited by 13 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Konstruktion der alternativen Welt von der Autorität und Überzeugungskraft der Gegenwartsanalyse profitiert: Weil die Diagnose so überzeugend klingt, glaubt man, daß auch die Therapie die gleiche Verbindlichkeit besitzt. (Seeber 2003c: 46 Seeber (1970), McCutcheon (1971, Stockinger (1981), Kuon (1986) und in jüngerer Zeit Baker- Smith (2011) und Layh (2014) (Fohrmann 1994: 375). Dieser «Surplus-Theorie» (ebd.)…”

Section: Utopische Funktionenunclassified

BILDER EINER BESSEREN WELT Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film

Spiegel¹

2019

Zürcher Filmstudien

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Seit Thomas Morus’ Utopia sind in den letzten 500 Jahren zahlreiche literarische Werke erschienen, die eine bessere Welt entwerfen. Im Film scheint die positive Utopie dagegen inexistent. Die bisherige Forschung konzentrierte sich fast ausschließlich auf dystopische Spielfilme, da positive Szenarien den Anforderungen des Mediums angeblich zuwiderlaufen. Bilder einer besseren Welt wählt einen anderen Ansatz und nimmt, ausgehend von der Erkenntnis, dass auch literarische Utopien primär als Reaktionen auf eine missliche Gegenwart und nicht als unter haltende Erzählungen gedacht sind, mit dem Dokumentar und Propagandafilm einen bisher kaum erforschten Bereich in den Fokus. Die Studie baut auf aktuellen Erkenntnissen der Utopie und Dokumentar filmforschung auf und behandelt ein historisch und thematisch weit gefasstes Filmkorpus. Zu den unter suchten Werken gehören zionistische Propaganda filme, filmische Stadtutopien, sozialistische Zukunfts filme sowie Web Videos der Terrororganisation Islamischer Staat.

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Section: Utopische Funktionenunclassified

BILDER EINER BESSEREN WELT Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film

Spiegel¹

2019

Zürcher Filmstudien

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“…Over the years, numerous commentators on Utopia have drawn attention to its highly peculiar composition, its extensive use of rhetorical figures and its ingenious wordplay, which all combine to generate a pervasive sense of mockery, so that the entire work reeks of a 'seriocomic' style (Pineas 1961;Heiserman 1963;McCutcheon 1971;McCutcheon 1983;Fox 1993, 52-65;Baker-Smith 2000, 38-55). This can already be gauged from More's distinctive choice of name for his imaginary island which, although it has become synonymous with 'ideal place', was initially meant to convey a 'non-existing place'.…”

Section: ***mentioning

confidence: 99%

How to Grow a Nose: The Education of Desire in More’s Utopia and Sade’s Libertine Republic

Nobus¹

2018

College Literature

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Five hundred years after it first appeared in print, Thomas More's small libellus on the best state of a commonwealth, which came to be known simply as Utopia, remains one of the greatest literary enigmas of the Renaissance, and much of its enduring appeal is due to this, its obstinate and persistent refusal to see its textual cipher being unlocked.In his highly acclaimed Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt famously compared "More's conundrum" (Carey 1999, 38) to the impenetrable and incongruous mood elicited by Hans Holbein the Younger's celebrated painting "The Ambassadors" which, although it was completed seventeen years after Utopia was released, plays on a similar configuration of strangely disquieting, anamorphic art (1980,(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26). On occasion, Utopia's semantic quandary has even been equated to the maddening inscrutability of the stately portrait of the author himself, which Holbein painted in 1527, and which has become the standard representation of More during his later years as Chancellor of Henry VIII (Ackroyd 1998, 260-61; Achterhuis 2016, 25-26). What kind of man are we looking at here? Is he really as authoritative, shrewd and uncompromising as his sumptuous gown and livery collar suggest? Isn't he rather more convivial, to the point where he can barely conceal a self-satisfied smirk? Is the profound ambiguity of

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“…And ironizing it all, the Morepersona undercuts Raphael' s positive views on Utopia as a property-less, moneyless country at the very end. We are in Utopia constantly made to hold in our mind contraries, each of which it obliquely weighs against the other, notably through the use of the figure of speech litotes, through expressions such as 'not unwise', 'not the worst', of which there are over 140 examples in the first 100 pages of the Latin text (McCutcheon, 1971).…”

Section: More's Utopia: Ethics Play and Seriousnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Utopía: 500 años

Guerra¹

2016

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This chapter sees Utopia as at once a place of dreams, a place of the good, and a place which is nowhere to be found: paradox, ambiguity, and janus-facedness are embedded in a very modern punning coupling of the good, 'eu', and the nonexistent, 'ou', made by Thomas More in his Greek neologism 'utopia', title of his eponymous book, which was written in Latin (1516). Moored and yet in recent years unmoored from its Eurocentric roots, utopia has become more than a word or a culture-specific term. I argue that the word utopia was coined at a formative moment of European modernity, that the utopian mode crosses cultures, and after a consideration of More's Utopia then discuss in comparative perspective some keyworks in the utopian mode from South Asia, especially India, written in the colonial period, in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. How do we recognize a utopia in a non-European context: must it have that strong element of irony that we find in More's foundational work? Is utopia always part of a secularizing impulse, or does religious imagination deserve a major place in our understanding of it? How do we make taxonomical distinctions between pieces of prose fiction that we term utopian, and the many real-life utopian communities that have flourished globally? Is there, that is, a distinction to be made between fictional, ironic imagination in literary texts, and more grounded utopian socio-political movements? In this chapter, I analyze certain strands in utopian thought and writing from South Asia (a region comprising sovereign countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), mainly India, and see how answers may be given. My emphasis is on texts both fictional and non-fictional, and I take the literary aspects of those texts as important.

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Denying the contrary: More’s use of litotes in the Utopia

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

BILDER EINER BESSEREN WELT Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film

BILDER EINER BESSEREN WELT Die Utopie im nichtfiktionalen Film

How to Grow a Nose: The Education of Desire in More’s Utopia and Sade’s Libertine Republic

Utopía: 500 años

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