Nowhere and Somewhere: Utopia, Dystopia and Their Relative Location

The work criticizes the dichotomy utopia - dystopia, especially the way the two are being defined as genres in some theoretical reflections representing that represent the main approaches to the theoretical concept of utopia and dystopia. The work also analyses sample literary texts traditionally labelled as utopias or dystopias. In the first part we review some definitions and present their shortcomings. Consequently, we reject the attempts to make general definitions as they fail to become reasonable basis for literary research. The texts being accounted for are the classical utopias and dystopias: Thomas More's Utopia, Tommaso Campanella's The City of the Sun, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984. The second part offers a comparative approach to the text analysis based on textual relationships and the assemblage of text (the rules for building the text structure). Apparently, such analysis spares the need to make general definitions of the terms and to look for the nature of utopia and dystopia