Campanella, Tomasso | Timothy J. Reiss (essay date 1973)
Timothy J. Reiss (essay date 1973)
SOURCE: "Structure and Mind in Two Seventeenth-Century Utopias: Campanella and Bacon," in Yale French Studies, Vol. 49, 1973, pp. 82-95.
[Reiss compares Campanella's and Bacon's Utopian texts as illustrating two types of Utopian vision—"the dynamic and the static."]
The Utopian thinker, according to Marx, writes as a bourgeois who, in the silence of his study, gives free play at once to his reason and his imagination, and it may be supposed that this acknowledged duality of cause has its reflexion in the result. For the utopian ideal is at once a meditation upon history or an historical situation and a proposing of an "ideal" solution to that history. Indeed, to the extent that the utopia represents at once myth and the reasoned attempt to permit the insertion of that myth into the stream of History, it clearly partakes—as a literary text—of that epistemological division of thought...
[The entire page is 4809 words long]
Navigate
