Jenny C. Mann will be presenting at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Print, Networks, and Performance on Monday March 16th, 2026 at 4:30 in Posner Hall, Room 234 on the subject “The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance.”
What is utopia? An impractical scheme? An imaginary invention? A perfect society or a totalitarian nightmare? Today, students, activists, artists, and scholars are urgently contesting the question of what utopia is, debating how to find it or make it or resist it. Such debates often hinge on how different communities evaluate the political content of utopia, including the models of social organization detailed in its narratives. Having taught utopia in the undergraduate literature classroom for many years, I have seen this firsthand: after reading a utopian fiction, students immediately begin to debate whether the model society depicted within would make their own lived reality better or worse. In gaming out such questions, they are asking themselves, would that system work here, where I live?Within the space of the classroom, and now, within the space of this talk,I am asking readers to resist the impulse to assign utopia coordinates within their own reality and instead play a different game.
Rather than evaluating what utopia means, that is, whether its model of government is “good” or “bad,” my research focuses on how it is made. My forthcoming book, The Forms of Utopia: Paradox, Labyrinth, and Recursion in the Renaissance (Princeton UP 2026),argues that utopia is a literary form, not a political content. First devised by Thomas More in 1516, utopia is a puzzle-box of logical paradox and unreality. And precisely because it detaches itself from reality, I argue, utopia’s form enables the expression of otherwise unthinkable ideas.
To explain the complicated make-up and radical potential of utopia’s looping form, The Forms of Utopia returns to the moment of utopia’s inception in the 16th century. Focusing on the creation and development of utopia’s elaborate structure during the early modern period, I demonstrate how paradox, labyrinth, and recursion become primary forms of utopian invention. In the hands of a succession of influential English writers—Thomas More, William Shakespeare, and Margaret Cavendish—utopia evolves into a formal program that converts self-enclosure into a method of unending expansion. Put simply: utopia is a form designed to capture infinity.
In demonstrating the impossible action of utopia’s form, I situate More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s Tempest, and Cavendish’s Blazing World in conversation with a series of ancient and medieval artworks that materially express aspects of utopia’s perplexing structure. Over the course of the book, readers gain a detailed understanding of utopia’s impossible geometries, which confound inside and outside, generating a disorienting sense of topological wrongness and mental vertigo. Utopia’s logically impossible space, and the method of poetic invention it implies, endure far beyond the seventeenth century, evident in works by writers stretching from Jonathan Swift to Margaret Atwood.
Thomas More’s Utopia was first published in Latin in 1516, early in the reign of Henry VIII. It is a philosophical text that presents itself as a traveler’s tale: its central narrator is a fictional explorer who has recently journeyed to an idealized island nation with an apparently perfect political system, and the text is a description of what the narrator has seen there. A sixteenth-century reader of More’s Utopia called it a way of “patterning a Commonwealth,” and critics now give the name “utopia” to any work that describes an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions. Such a fiction is far older than the name “utopia”—for example, Plato’s Republic could be called a utopian fiction (it features a dialogue in which Socrates imagines a perfectly just state)—but it is Thomas More’s text gave the genre its name and its characteristic form.
Utopia is really difficult to summarize or paraphrase—it is an extremely complicated text with an elaborate construction. The description of the island of Utopia occupies the center of the text, a description narrated by a Portuguese sailor named Raphael Hythloday, a man who has purportedly journeyed to the island of Utopia. This description, however, is surrounded by a series of framing devices, including a prefatory book that narrates the writer “Thomas More’s” encounter with the mysterious Hythloday on the streets of Antwerp as well as a subsequent series of conversations shared in the back garden of More’s Antwerp house (More stages the fictional encounter with the literary character Raphael Hythloday during the time of one of his “real” diplomatic missions to the Low Countries). Prior even to this story the reader will already have encountered a map of the island, a picture of its alphabet, and a series of letters between “Thomas More” and many of his famous friends who testify to the empirical truth of the text. Each of these letters insists that the story is true, and that Thomas More is simply a faithful witness of what “actually happened.”
All of this framing constitutes what C.S. Lewis first termed the “game” of Utopia: it looks the reader straight in the eye and claims, over and over again, that this outlandishly fictional invention is true while also pointing to all of the ways in which it is a fabrication. Why? Is Thomas More making fun of people who aren’t sophisticated enough to get the joke? Does it have something to do with the shocking political content of the text, which implies a serious critique of the Tudor economic and justice systems? Is More hiding from punishment by pretending that he didn’t invent the whole thing? How can we tell what More really means by it?? This preoccupation with what it all means, I argue, is a function of the great trick of the text, a massive distraction from the real story here, which is the radical potential of utopia’s virulent form.
The form of Utopia animates virulent contradictions—namely, the paradox of a form that refers to the negation of itself rather than attempting to represent the world—and transforms those contradictions into a dynamic space. This pure formalism, ironically, constitutes utopia’sradical political potential: its ability to convert enclosure into a method of unpredictable and unrelenting expansion.
My book, The Forms of Utopia, centers the structure and stakes of utopia’s paradoxical form rather than its various historical contexts. This turn to form does not deny the salience of history or politics to the meaning of utopia, which would be ludicrous, but it does assert that utopia’s persistent drawing away from the concrete world is an important source of its political generativity.
To fully reckon with utopia, we must countenance the idea that its abstractions productively disengage from the real. This disengagement is not necessarily radical, nor is it always conservative, but it does foster specific forms of imaginative liberty. To understand the stakes of this possibly amoral speculative liberty, I center the experience of the reader who enters utopia’s confines. As the abstract geometries of utopia are navigated by living readers, its axonometric projections torque, further destabilizing the relation between fiction and reality.
The unsettling experience of utopia’s recursive process of totalizing representation can spark creative excitement as well as new forms of social critique, but it equally often fosters suspicion and an overriding sense of oppression and even hopelessness. The two possibilities are forever twinned, as we can discern in the persistent modern debates about whether utopianism denotes totalitarian control or radical liberation. Each successive reader provides a new ontological ratio between the abstract realm of utopia and the empirical realm of history. Each time someone reads utopia, nowhere becomes here.
This generative, often maddening form is not political in a conventional sense, in that it cannot be firmly affixed to a specific ideology nor subject to the demands of a single historical context. Yet the form of utopia is political in a more abstract sense, in that it disrupts sequential, linear models of time, allowing past and present to touch and opening new spaces of the possible. In its perspectival variation, utopia reveals how all unitary cosmologies rely on perspectival illusion; such cosmologies depend on rendering one point of view absolute. As an experience, utopia unsettles both its creators and its visitors; it confounds common sense and generates unpredictable outcomes. In this way, utopia prevents us from falsely absolutizing what happens to be our own point of view.
With my book, I would like to carve out a place for this complicated literary experience within the domain of Utopian Studies. Cryptic and disturbing, utopia provides the formal matrix for a collective experience without beginning and without end, like a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. This matrix is fundamentally inhuman in its abstraction and scope; we can catch a piece of it—I have, in this book—but utopia will continue to ramify without us, long after the conclusion of our own small lifespans. Every time someone else plays the game, time pleats, here becomes “now,” and new levels are forged within utopia’s bottomless, multidimensional literary space. Utopia has already enclosed me within its confines, and maybe, soon, it will capture you.
