Pour une morphologie du genre utopique [For a morphology of the utopian genre] by Corin Braga (review)

Corin Braga is a professor of comparative literature and the head of one of the most important research centers exploring the imaginary in Romania. As he has published extensively on issues related to utopia, this thoroughly researched volume represents only a continuation of his previous works entitled Du para-dis perdu à l'antiutopie aux XVI^e–XVIII^e siècles (From Paradise Lost to Anti-utopia in the 16th–18th centuries_ (Paris, 2010) and Les antiutopies classiques (Classical antiutopias] (Paris, 2012). As indicated by the title of the reviewed book, this is a morphological approach to utopia, promising not only a structuralist reconstruction of the genre, through a series of systematic descriptions of the convoluted evolutions of this complex cultural idea but also, as stated in the "Introduction," an overview of a profoundly modern paradigm.

For obvious reasons, this is not an easily accomplishable research objective, both due to the fact that the classification of such a hybrid term like "utopia" presents any specialist with almost insuperable terminological challenges, and because its manifestations are often transgressing the borders of a multitude of disciplines. Five centuries after Thomas Morus published his seminal work, our cultural and social experiences are still influenced by a "utopian mode." This utopian predisposition, described by the author as utopism, can be traced both in practical and in theoretical utopias. It is here that Braga makes the necessary distinction between the sociopolitical mode of utopia and the utopian literary genre, which provides formally and thematically identifiable manifestations. By focusing on literary utopias, defined as fictional universes, the author establishes a clear corpus of works to be analyzed, a multitude of literary productions for an extended period of time, covering almost all written texts from 1516 to 2015.

Dealing with fantasy tales, adventure and travel novels, scientific prose and science fiction works, satirical utopias and the most recent fantasy world-making, this book is structured in four major parts, each preceded by a theoretical chapter dealing with conceptual nuances and ending with a necessary conclusion.

This research provides a clear taxonomy of what the author identifies as "the utopian genre" by describing four typologies: ou-topia, eu-topia, dystopia and anti-utopia. Each is then carefully surveyed in individual chapters, focusing on the most representative texts of the respective category, providing a systematic ordering and contextualizing them according to their historical relevance. Distinguishing the "positive topias" and the negative ones, the author separates utopia and anti-utopia (or dystopia). So, one of the central methodological approaches deals with the implicit dichotomy between the two notions. Reconsidering the long-standing opposition and accepted contradiction between the utopian and the dystopian, Braga reorganizes the ample material related to Utopia by developing the existing concepts—such as the traditional pair utopia–dystopia—into a more complex schematic, in which he is adding eutopia and anti-utopia (sometimes identified with counter-utopia). Starting with the methodological tool provided by the Bakhtinian categories of the chronotope, this research reconfigures the maps of meanings dividing the Present and the "Here," on the one hand, from the Future, or the "Somewhere else," on the other.

It is here that the major quality of this book resides, as the author manages to create a clear conceptual map of literary utopias, one that can be easily expanded into other forms of cultural manifestations (like cinema or other media representations). Based on a particularly eloquent explanatory system of quadruple categories, this research outstandingly expands on the metaphor of electrolysis. This allows Braga to isolate the main anodes and cathodes of Utopia, with the positive "topias" and their negative variants symmetrically influencing and mirroring each other. The "here" and the "now" are not simply opposed by the "there" and the "then," as the negative traits travel both in space or time. So, in eutopias and outopias, the negative poles of the...