More after More. Essays Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia
Redaktorzy: Ksenia Olkusz, Michał Kłosiński, Krzysztof M. Maj
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Preface
12 – 13
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Gregory Claeys
Utopia at 500
14 – 24
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utopia |Thomas More

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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 Belgium. 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...


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Royal Holloway University of London, Anglia
Lucas Misseri
Evantropia and Dysantropia: A Possible New Stage in the History of Utopias
26 – 42
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Thomas More |utopia

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The term utopia was coined five centuries ago but to some extent the utopian imagination is something that every civilisation has embraced. A utopia is grosso modo a normative image of a society based on particular needs—and the possible solutions to those needs—from the point of view of a collective or individual subject. This subject is limited by his or her time-space coordinates: language, history and culture in general...


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National University of Chilecito, Argentyna
Tomasz Szymański
The Facets of “Universal Religion”: Religion in Nineteenth-Century French Utopian Thought
44 – 55
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utopia |Thomas More

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When talking about universal religion as an element of utopian thought, and more precisely of nineteenth-century French utopian thought, one should begin with questioning the relationship between religion and utopia. The polysemy of the concept of utopia means that this relationship cannot be unequivocally described. For Raymond Trousson, a Belgian historian, utopia, as opposed to the myth of the Golden Age, is an attempt to achieve heavenly happiness (Trousson 2001) and can take the form of either literary invention or a political programme which aim to change the world...


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Uniwersytet Wrocławski
Peter G. Stillman
Twenty-first Century Critical Dystopias
56 – 73
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dystopia

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The twenty-first century, like the twentieth, has seen a flourishing of dystopian novels in which human actions and institutions have created powerful and destructive societies that control and manipulate human beings. Perhaps even more than the twentieth century, the twenty-first has seen an outburst of post-apocalyptic narratives that tell the story of what human life on earth is like after cataclysmic events that wipe out many people and institutions...


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Vassar College in New York, USA
Krzysztof M. Maj
Deconstructing Utopia
74 – 88
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utopia |Thomas More

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Why did King Utopus cut his domain off the mainland? The answer to that question has to be twofold, resembling in a way a bipartite composition of the founding work for all narrative utopias to come, i.e. Thomas More’s De optimo reipublicæ. Utopia, on the one hand, could have been essentially different from topia, topos, topoi as a substantiation of the metaphysical reign over signs or, on the other hand, as an emanation of the holistic, totalitarian need to build a brave new world in place of perfecting the former one...


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Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie

Ksenia Olkusz
Micro-dystopias as Socio-political Constructs in Post-apocalyptic Narratives
90 – 102
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dystopia |micro-dystopia

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Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature is often debated in terms of the end, emphasising catastrophic aspects of these narratives as well as indicating the demographic reduction (and thus defeat) of the human race. Some scholar, including James Berger and Anette M. Magid, underscore paradoxically union nature of the narratives dealing with the twilight of the anthropocene...


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Ośrodek Badawczy Facta Ficta

Mariusz Finkielsztein
Boredom and Melancholy in Utopias and Dystopias
104 – 117
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Boredom |Melancholy |utopia |dystopia

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In many ways, utopia was the humanists’ replacement for Paradise—Christian utopia of eternal life (Manuel, Manuel 1979). Arthur Schopenhauer was among the first in a long line of Western thinkers to suggest the powerful agency of the experience or the state of boredom in jeopardising the sustainability of utopian states of being: “after man had transferred all pain and torments to hell, there then remained nothing over for heaven but ennui” (Schopenhauer 2011: 401)...


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Uniwersytet Warszawski

Miłosz Markocki
Creating Utopian or Dystopian Worlds in Digital Games
118 – 133
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utopia |dystopia |digital games

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For centuries people have been fascinated with the idea of an ideal society. Many thinkers and philosophers have been coming up with new ideas either to improve their societies or to propose visions of what in their opinion would be an ideal community. The creation of visions of ideal societies required a counterbalance image of a society to better highlight what makes a society or a country good or bad...


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Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu

Michał Kłosiński
SimCity: Where the City Ends
134 – 146
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SimCity

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The newest title in the SimCity franchise, published in 2013 and named SimCity 2013, is the first multiplayer version of the widely acknowledged city builder game. This specific genre focuses on delivering players two things: an advanced virtual simulation of economy which governs the game world and, specifically, the city; and the ability to plan, construct, erase, and control particular elements of the virtual city (types of roads, city transport, terrain designated for commerce, housing or industry, tax system etc.)...


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Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach
Sven Dwulecki
“Building the Future and Keeping the Past Alive Are One and the Same Thing”—A Rhetorical Analysis of the “Metal Gear Solid” Saga
148 – 170
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Metal Gear Solid

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One Game to Awe Them All: "War has changed. It’s no longer about nations, ideologies, or ethnicity. It’s an endless series of proxy battles fought by mercenaries and machines. War—and its consumption of life—has become a welloiled machine. War has changed. ID-tagged soldiers carry ID-tagged weapons, use ID-tagged gear. Nano-machines inside their bodies enhance and regulate their abilities. Genetic control, information control, emotion control, battlefield control. Everything is monitored and kept under control. War has changed. The age of deterrence has become the age of control. All in the name of averting catastrophe wrought by weapons of mass destruction. And he who controls the battlefield controls history. War has changed. When the battlefield is under total control war becomes routine" (Globalgamereport 2008: 1:24-3:00). This introductory monologue leaves no doubt that the world of Metal Gear Solid has taken a turn for the worst in its last instalment. As we take a closer look at this opening scene, we see how a game exposition may serve as a forward glimpse of upcoming dystopian events; we also remark the highly rhetorical character of the game...


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Universität Tübingen, Niemcy
Verena Adamik
Digging the Trench: Fictional Accounts of Utopian Communities and Utopian Closure
172 – 187
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Thomas More |utopia

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Musing about the purposes of utopian communities, Lyman Tower Sargent suggested that such projects “demonstrate that living a better life is possible in the here and now” (2010: 8). In the three novels discussed in this chapter—Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants (1793), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Edan Lepucki’s California (2014)—the success of the attempt at “living a better life” depends on whether closure for the depicted communities can be established. Building on Fredric Jameson’s proposition that “utopian space is an imaginary enclave within real social space” (2005: 15), this chapter concerns how the novels depict such enclaves in relation to the “real social space” in which the communities start out...


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Universität Potsdam, Niemcy
Rafał Szczerbakiewicz
Classical Utopian Model. On the Melancholy Status of Jan Parandowski’s Ancient Discourse
188 – 209
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Jan Parandowski |utopia

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Is utopia necessarily a project for the future? Does it involve, in the sense of a desire, a kind of aspiration? From the perspective of the structure of a desire, nothing else may be inferred. Yet, the inversions of desires projected backwards (and also, perhaps, the structure of a utopian desire, as understood by Fredric Jameson who called it the “archaeology of the future”) prove that there are exceptions to this rule (Jameson 2005). The utopian temptation is a desire of ideological nature and refers to the socio-political construction of a community...


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Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie
Andrzej Drożdż
Parodies of Authority in the Soviet Anti-utopias from 1918-1930
210 – 223
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Anti-utopia

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After the abolition of censorship ensuing from the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian social science fiction of the 1920s was provided with a new perspective for research in literary history. In Russia literary anti-utopias evoked a particular interest of the researchers. “Who read science fiction utopia in 1920s? This is difficult to measure”—writes Richard Stites (Stites 1989: 173). No less difficult is to define how to read utopian and dystopian literature as censorship did not allow to conduct research for decades in the Soviet Union. Russian researchers emphasize the flexibility of the determinants of literary genres of utopia, so the terms anti-utopia and dystopia are used frequently interchangeably...


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Biblioteka Jagiellońska w Krakowie
Aleksandra Paluch
The Analysis of the Element of Space in Negative Utopias by Antoni Lange, Jan Dobraczyński & Vladímir Páral
224 – 236
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utopia |Antoni Lange |Jan Dobraczyński |Vladímir Páral

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Hanna Buczyńska-Garewicz proposes to comprehend space from the perspective of the “hermeneutics of place”. Namely, understanding space means treating it as a relation rather than an ultimate existence. The source of every space, that is to say realized space, lies in sensation, experience, mood, and action. This is the life experience that establishes space, not the other way round. The space of life is subjective, relativized, but primarily emotional, full of particular meanings and content (Buczyńska-Garewicz 2006: 10-13). The hermeneutic perspective enables to treat space not only as a place or a territory...


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Uniwersytet Opolski
Piotr Stasiewicz
Libertarian Utopia and Racist Dystopia: Social Commentary in Robert Heinlein’s “Farnham’s Freehold”
238 – 251
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utopia |dystopia |science fiction |Robert Heinlein

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In her essay published in Science Fiction Studies Julia List argues that publication of several key science fiction novels in the 1960s, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, marks the turning point in the history of the genre. She calls that decade “a period when the genre’s focus shifted dramatically towards exploring the social ramifications of scientific developments rather than the intricacies of the technologies themselves” (List 2009)...


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Uniwersytet w Białymstoku
Anna de Vaul
No Light Without Shadow: The Control of Language and Discourse in Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Fiction
252 – 264
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dystopia |Margaret Atwood |Eutopia

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Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author whose most recent dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, was published in 2015, nearly thirty years after her first book, The Handmaid’s Tale, in 1986. Although these two novels were written decades apart and the circumstances leading to the formation of the dystopian societies within the novels differ, there are a number of common threads running throughout the stories and worlds. These common threads include environmental concerns, ideas about the commodification of sex, portrayals of the dangers of allowing personal belief to influence power, and a focus on the vulnerability of women. However, the most striking and significant common threads, to me, are her focus on the relationship between eutopia and dystopia and her emphasis on the control of discourse by each of the regimes...

Anna Bugajska
Senescence in Young Adult Dystopias
266 – 279
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dystopia

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When five hundred years ago More was describing a perfect state, he laid a special importance on equality. And yet, there was a repetitive pattern, ensuring the privileged place in the society for those senior in age and experience: “Each household, as I said, comes under the authority of the oldest male. Wives are subordinate to their husbands, children to their parents, and younger people generally to their elders” (More 1970: 80). The reverence for the elderly clearly reflected medieval notions of an old man as a supreme manager...


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Wyższa Szkoła Europejska im. ks. Józefa Tischnera w Krakowie
Marcin Tereszewski
Modern Wastelands: The Psychogeographical Dystopia of J.G. Ballard’s “High-Rise”
280 – 292
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dystopia |James Graham Ballard

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Urban environments have frequently served as a setting for both utopian and dystopian narratives, representing both our progressive dreams as well as our nightmares; however, following the rapid urbanization of England during the nineteenth century, literature has most often cast urban living in a dystopian light. And with the end of World War II, when more emphasis was placed on urban planning as a means of ensuring social harmony, the line separating fiction and urban planning became increasingly blurred. After all, urban spaces, as David Harvey remarked, are “somewhere where fact and imagination simply have to fuse” (Harvey 1990: 5) and architecture has come to play a significant role in how we conceptualize our relation to the environment...


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Uniwersytet Wrocławski
Maja Wojdyło
The Use of Multimodal Narrative Techniques in Creating Dystopian Undertones Permeating David Foster Wallace’s Short Fiction
294 – 309
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dystopia |David Foster Wallace |Short Fiction

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Set in the Organization of North American Nations, in a near future when the passing years are no longer denoted with numbers, but are given corporate-sponsored names instead, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s most widely known novel is an unquestionable generic and thematic dystopia. When it comes to his short fiction, except for Datum Centurio, the pieces do not involve storyworlds considerably divergent from the popular image of the Western world at the turn of the century...


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Uniwersytet Gdański
Barbara Klonowska
A Utopian, a Martyr or a Fool: Fictional Portrayals of Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons” and “Wolf Hall”
310 – 320
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utopia |Thomas More

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The figure of Sir Thomas More, the founding father of utopian thought, a scholar and a saint, has attracted the attention of numerous writers and playwrights who made him a protagonist of their works. His biography, abounding in dramatic changes of fortune, first from an average lawyer to the Lord Chancellor of England, through the impoverishment and disfavour following his refusal to support king Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and finally to the dramatic circumstances of his imprisonment in the Tower of London, the trial for high treason and the ensuing beheading—all of these events are a tempting and almost ready-made material for all possible kinds of dramatic or novelistic plots...


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Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II

Anna Boguska
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 – 336
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utopia |Vladan Desnica |Pavao Pavličić

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Fátima Vieira who engaged in a reflection about the notion of utopia—which, according to her, is anamnestic in nature—emphasises that utopia itself is (in a paradoxical manner) an attribute of the modern way of thinking and one of its discernible consequences (Vieira 2010: 6). To corroborate the statement, she indicates the utopia’s facility to assume new meanings or forms, to “disperse” in various directions and to absorb the more and more fields of human activity which results in blurring its identity, thus being defined in many ways (she herself indicates four different concepts of the understanding of the notion)...


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Polska Akademia Nauk
Michał Palmowski
The Elementary Particles: “Brave New World” According to Michel Houellebecq
338 – 351
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Michel Houellebecq

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The five-hundredth anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia may be an opportunity to re-examine other foundational texts of the utopian studies. Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World is definitely one of them. It is commonly described as a “negative utopia” (sensu: Baker 1990, Körtner 1995, Higdon 2013, Samaan 2013) a vicious satire on the technocratic society, in which most human beings lead emotionally and spiritually barren lives, being reduced, by means of brainwashing and genetic engineering, to utter stupidity. It is argued that Huxley warns us against “scientific utopianism” responsible for this nightmarish future, in which there is no room for such values, central to each liberal thinker and humanist, as freedom, love, or human dignity...


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Uniwersytet Jagielloński w Krakowie
Eleni Varmazi
The Unusual Dystopia of “Never Let Me Go” (2010)
352 – 363
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dystopia |Never Let Me Go |Kazuo Ishiguro |Mark Romanek |Alex Garland

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In this chapter I argue how Never Let Me Go (2010) differs from other dystopian films regarding both its aesthetics and theme. The film was not created in order to fulfil the functions performed typically by dystopian hard science fiction films. On the contrary, it discusses ideas and subject matters of a different nature that belong to other genres, if at all. This fact makes Never Let Me Go a special case study which resists categorization...


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Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi, Turcja
Justyna Galant
“Transmetropolitan”. Dystopia, Hyperbole, and the Superhero
364 – 374
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dystopia |Hyperbole |Superhero |Warren Ellis |Darrick Robertson

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The comic book series Transmetropolitan written by Warren Ellis, pencilled by Darrick Robertson and published by DC Comics between 1997 and 2002, is an acclaimed futuristic vision of an American metropolis and its notorious journalist, Spider Jerusalem, who returns to the city after a long absence to publish a series of articles headlined “I Hate It Here”. In the symbiotic relationship, the urban space allows the man to find the Anger and the battle spirit to fight for the revelation of the constantly obscured Truth, while the city, the nurturer of his journalistic passion, uses him as a voice, a means of expression, and a medium...


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Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej w Lublinie
Marcello Messina
Liberation, Redemption, Autonomy: Contemporary Utopias in Southern Italian Popular Music
376 – 392
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utopia |Liberation |Redemption |autonomy |popular music

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Alongside the passionate interest, shown by Southern Italian intellectuals and artists, for the renegotiation of the official historical narratives (Messina 2015), the celebrations for the 150th anniversary of the Unification of Italy have at times reawakened the need to imagine a better future. These exercises in utopianism have constructed, from time to time, a future characterized by the liberation from the mafia, or by the bridge of the economic gap with the rest of the country, or even by the overcoming of national unity towards autonomy or independence-based solutions...


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Universidade Federal do Acre, Brazylia
Iwona Sowińska-Fruhtrunk
Arnold Schoenberg’s Dodecaphonic Method as a Representation of an Artistic Utopia
394 – 405
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utopia |Arnold Schoenberg |Thomas Mann |Doctor Faustus

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The purpose of this chapter is to propose closer approach to certain aspects of Arnold Schoenberg’s life and work as situated in the context of utopian thinking. I seek to establish a link between the composer’s religious and political beliefs, his interest in philosophy and mysticism, and his musical output, focusing mainly on the dodecaphonic method invented by the artist. The primary intention is to prove that the above-mentioned aspects of Schoenberg’s personality and work reveal a life lasting and somehow naïve wish to create and believe in the utopian world. Finally, the opposite, dystopic face of the utopian thinking is examined using the example of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, where the invention of dodecaphony is attributed to devil himself...


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Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie
Łukasz Stec
Space Utopia in the 1970s of the Twentieth Century on the Basis of the Kobaïan World
406 – 419
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utopia |Kobaïan Saga

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Utopia has been depicted in a plethora of works of culture. Thus, its omnipresence creates a considerable incentive to approach the subject from a completely different angle. Endeavouring to put the problem of utopia into wider perspective, this chapter focuses on music and its relation to utopian concepts and notions. Utopias tend to raise the problem of the world improvement. According to Lyman Tower Sargent “most utopias compare life in the present and life in the utopia and point out what is wrong with the way we now live, thus suggesting what needs to be done to improve things” (Sargent 2010: 5)...


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Uniwersytet Rzeszowski
Pobierz cały numer
1 – 430
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