18세기 영국 계몽주의 문학 속의 유토피아적 공간

Abstract

My purpose in this paper is to explore Enlightenment utopian literatures in view of ecologization of the utopian landscape as one of the major critique of English Enlightenment. Starting with contextualizing the ecology of landscape valorized in utopian literatures within the English Enlightenment, I will argue that one of the commonly observed, though ignored, assumptions of the English Enlightenment is its strong ascendancy of human-centered Enlightenment reason which is conducive to naturalize and justify human domination over nature, symptomatically epitomized in David Hume’s The Idea of a Prefect Commonwealth by acknowledging “the justness of the poet’s exclamation on the endless projects of human race, man and for ever” (69). In particular terms, I explore the ways in which those texts deal with ecological awareness such as the sense of limited natural resources, the sympathetic response to animal cruelty and the re-configuration of the human status in the Great Chain of Being, in connection with the burgeoning “new sensibility” in Keith Thomas’ term. This analysis shows the utopian function of proto-ecological values as a valid critique of anthropocentricity of the Enlightenment. And perhaps more urgently, in view of the politics of ecological landscape in utopian literature, the proto-ecological tendency, prevalent in the utopian function of sympathy, exemplified in the utopians’sympathetic attitude to the suffering animals, is dialogically interwoven with the relationship between the politics of gender and class of that time and is mobilized as the strong socio-political alternative of its time.