토머스 모어의 『유토피아』: 해독하기 어려운 인문주의 텍스트

초록

This article reviews criticism on Thomas More’s Utopia, focusing on critics who read the work as a Renaissance humanist text. Fredric Jameson sheds new light on the text by defining it as a working prototype of literary utopianism in general. According to Jameson, Utopia’s “narrative praxis” unconsciously figures the social and ideological contradictions of the era, contradictions it intensively desires to resolve. To Jameson, social restructuring reformulates such contradictions instead of expunging them; Utopia’s utopian “figuration” reflects “a desperate final attempt” to envision a society without social contradictions. One can understand the value of such “extreme gesture” by considering how it enables the human mind to encounter the limitations imposed by the dominant ideology and look to new horizons of thinking. On the other hand, literary scholars invested in identifying More’s work as humanist highlight formal and semantic ambiguities within the text—especially those stemming from the tension between rivaling approaches of Morus and Hythloday—as its distinguishing characteristics. Reading Utopia as embodying Christian humanism, for instance, requires one to sympathize with More who is struggling to balance the Christian notion of man’s original sin and natural depravity with the emergent belief in human potential for progress and enlightenment. Likewise, understanding how More appropriates classical rhetoric leads one to appreciate Utopia as upholding humanist desires for unbiased and non-partisan thinking. As Stephen Greenblatt suggests, it is necessary to discern the parallel between competing value systems that splits Utopia and its author’s internal conflicts rooted in his ambivalence towards the real-world politics of the court and the church.

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