Utopia: relection on time and literary genre

• Grant number: 23/07054-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: October 17, 2023
• End date: January 16, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Literature Theory
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel
• Grantee: Carlos Eduardo Ornelas Berriel
• Host Investigator: Gianluca Bonaiuti
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy

Abstract

Since the 1516 founding text, Utopia has welcomed a plurality of times and, more precisely, has functioned as a factor of multiplication of historical time. Although the utopia presents itself as an intentional spatial revolution, as the invention-discovery of another space, it presupposes the operability of a historical time parallel to that of the narrator, marked by a different diachronic trajectory. In More's Utopia, therefore, there are two competing temporalities, which contribute to shaping different stories. From the moment utopian semantics were temporalized (Koselleck), projecting that other place into an alternative temporal dimension which was always placed in a remote future, the relationship between Utopia and time gradually became a problem. The present in Utopia, that of the narrator and that displaced in the future, do not coincide (the present time of the text, the future time of the imagined world, the intermediate time between the two) and, in addition, create further frictions with the time of the reader (or the reception of the work) which comes to be an intentional factor for conflict. This configuration tends to become radically critical in the experiences of the twentieth century avant-gardes, which were conceived as an element of radical rupture in relation to the past, and in which the new time tends to take the form of an anticipated utopian time. Diverging, Lukács saw in the work of art the human becoming, and there imputing a utopian dimension, in a time yet to come. These complications invite us to propose some questions - what is the time (historical temporalities or otherwise) that are within Utopia? What is the time of utopian reception? What is the time of Utopia, that is, to what forms of temporality it adapts - it is evident, for example, that the historical figure of utopian anticipation adapted well to the format of modern linear historicity, heir of that Christian one (Ernst Bloch), while refusing to adapt to a pluralization of the historical time of the contemporary world? Is the concept of utopia still relevant in the contemporaneity, marked by the fast technologies of the hegemonic capitalistic centers, as Fredric Jameson questions? Is there a History of the Future, as Georges Minois proposes? What is the time for Utopia, that is, what elements contribute to encourage utopian projection - and which ones slow it down? (AU)