Journal:
Even before finishing this book[I] I felt underwhelmed. First, it was too easy, as if any text from the 15th century needed to be difficult. Difficult because it should be foreign. And difficult because of one pre-existing standard for the text’s mould: Plato’s Republic.
Essay:
Before, I had categorized this book as a combination of Plato and Swift[II]. And so after, my thoughts were that it was insufficiently challenging and insufficiently fantastic.
Brainstorming:
- Structure: 1. Mixed thoughts on whether there’s much to be impressed-upon by this book. 2. [S-A]. 3. Commenting on the lite-ness of Utopia.
- S-A: Impressions I had when starting to read, based on readings, incl. Ackaroy, and including I1.
- I1: Incongruence of More’s humanism with his religious intolerance, with details of each.
- I2: Perspective of Utopia as stemming from More’s mind. Imagine it inside his mind.
- Could place writing itself into frame structure (cf. Utopia’s).
Meta: Brainstorming:
- When writing has at least two trains ongoing in parallel: Journal (informal, free-flowing) and Essay (whose defining feature may be that it can become a complete whole).
- List/collect items of thought into categories, such as – structure (of essay, incl. relations of content), and section (i.e. an idea for an amount of continuous text [format: S-A, S-B]), and idea (to be included somewhere [format: I1, I2]).
- A structure should have the property of goal, which itself may have a few different modes, e.g. idea to be presented, or an aesthetic construct
[I] “Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was also a councillor to Henry VIII, and Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to 16 May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary, ideal island nation.” For further details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More.
[II] This is, probably, written in reference to Jonathan Swift, “Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric who became Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin”. Swift is mostly known for “works such as A Tale of a Tub (1704), An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1712), Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729)” (for further details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift). A substantial body of research exists linking Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and Plato’s “Republic” (e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/jeffsliteraturecafe/jonathan-swift-s-gulliver-s-travels-as-a-parody-of-plato-s-republic, https://www.academia.edu/7094866/Gullivers_Travels_and_Platos_Republic_The_Allegory_of_The_Cave_and_the_Philosophers_Education, and more.
