Rhetoric as Utopia and Utopia as Rhetoric in 16 th -17 th -Century Literary Culture (original) (raw)

Among the great number of ways of proposing innovations and speaking about them, utopia is one of the most interesting, because of its borderline status between fiction and a project to be carried out. This characteristic of utopia was of key importance for Renaissance and Baroque, because these cultures would highly appreciate text as a cognitive tool. Enchantment by text, translation practices, reading and writing brought humanists to the interpretation of verbal creativity as, in a way, making a world of your own. This interpretation made scholars wonder, whether the utopias of 16 th-17 th centuries were projects intended for implementation, or just a kind of literary play, tightly intertwined with humanists' writing activity and their interest in antiquity and reconstruction or 'deconstruction' of it [Hexter 1973; Skinner 2014]. The latter theory is often counterposed to Marxist interpretations of utopian literature by T. More, A.F. Doni, T. Campanella etc. as predecessors of utopian socialism and commune-building; focussing on the literary character of renaissance utopias, this theory rejects anachronistic readings and appeals to the historical context and its specifics. Here I am going to show that these very specifics make utopian texts of early modern era meaningful for contemporary political philosophy (not Marxist, anyway) and for intellectual history, which involves considering topicality of historical sources for contemporary humanitarian studies and theories [LaCapra 1983]. The key factor of this importance is the function of text in the intellectual culture of 16 th-17 th centuries. This function and the way it worked within the topics of utopia reveals the significance of both of them for the principle of hope by E. Bloch, for the implications of allegory in theories by W. Benjamin and G. Deleuze, for the aesthetical politics and the sublime experience by F. Ankersmit. Generally speaking, the aim of this paper is to suggest the ways for elaborating, by exploration of Renaissance and Baroque utopian discourses, the links between political philosophy and the linguistic turn.