Glossopoesis in Thomas More’s Utopia: Beyond a representation of foreignness
-
Israel A. C. Noletto
and
Sebastião Alves Teixeira Lopes
Abstract
This paper demonstrates the premise that the Utopian language created for the narrative is more than something that only gives the impression of foreignness to the invented nation of Utopia, a mere representation of an outside culture. It is rather a semiotic system devised by the author specifically with the goal of transmitting a message. As such it is indispensable to a fuller understanding of More’s work, and therefore worthy of proper investigation. Consequently, the paper analyses the occurrences of the invented language throughout the author’s text and out of it, in Peter Giles’s writings, word by word, tracing the probable etymologies and meanings, comparing cognate or correlated words in other languages, while conciliating the use of the glossopoeia with the presumptions of semiotics. Some theorists and commentators contribute considerably to the present discussion: Culler (1981. The pursuit of signs. London: Routledge, Romm), James (1991. More’s strategy of naming in the Utopia. Sixteenth Century Journal 22(2). 173–183), Sacks (1999. Introduction to Thomas More’s Utopia. In Utopia. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s), as well as More’s and Peter Giles’s own elicitations. The result of such reflections is a theory on the critique of the names and the artificial words coined by Thomas More.
References
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© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to Meaningful data/Données signifiantes
- A data-driven computational semiotics: The semantic vector space of Magritte’s artworks
- New approaches to plastic language: Prolegomena to a computer-aided approach to pictorial semiotics
- Mesures et savoirs : Quelles méthodes pour l’histoire culturelle à l’heure du big data ?
- Visual semiotics and automatic analysis of images from the Cultural Analytics Lab: How can quantitative and qualitative analysis be combined?
- Uncertain infographics: Expressing doubt in data visualization
- Quelques expériences pour développer l’expression de sens en cartographie thématique
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- Semiotic alignment: Towards a dialogical model of interspecific communication
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- The mission of the Chinese puzzle: From a quest for order to seeking entertainment
- Memes, genes, and signs: Semiotics in the conceptual interface of evolutionary biology and memetics
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- Playing peripatos: Creativity and abductive inference in religion, art and war
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- The semiotic web of the research proposal
- Sic vita est: Visual representation in painting of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY
