With the publication of Utopia in 1516, Thomas More inaugurated a new genre, reviving a theme already known to the Greeks. Is utopia the ideal place or is it not even a place? In this open interpretation, a discourse on happiness is left, on the margins of the existential order and the dominant thought. But what is the discourse we are talking about?
This volume aspires to demonstrate that utopia does not emerge only through political criticism. The search for and construction of relations between the ideal and the real pass equally through literature, theater, music, art, and architecture – and all these manifestations of utopia also stem from history and paradox.
Beyond the interpretations and successive appropriations of utopia, the approximately seventy contributors to this project wish to redefine, behind allegory and through an intense verbal polysemy, the concept of an imaginary structure in a predetermined time, from Saint Augustine's Republic of God to virtual worlds, from the Golden Age to the Apocalypse, from Rousseau and Walter Benjamin to Dadaism and counterculture.
THE Michèle Riot-Sarcey is a historian, professor emeritus at the University of Paris-VIII. Among her works stand out Le réel de l'utopie (1998), L'utopie en questions (2001) and Histoire du féminisme (2002).
THE Thomas Bouchet, With a rich writing and research career, author of, among others, Le Roi et les barricades (2000), he is a historian and assistant professor at the University of Lausanne.
THE Antoine Picon specializes in the History of Architecture and Technology of the 20th/21st centuries. He is co-director of Doctoral Programs at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the author, among others, of Les saint-simoniens: Raison, imaginaire et utopie (2002).
Prologue: Vasilis Vamvakas, Associate Professor of Sociology of Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
