Stitching time and space: The functions of temporal comparisons in utopias and beyond

Abstract

No literary genre seems to be more popular to transport the hopes and fears of humans than the genre of utopia. With the temporalization of Utopia in the 18th century temporal gaps where opened, that had to be somehow closed to explain the reader their present and the fictive future. The means of choice to close the temporal gap is the temporal comparison. On the basis of a corpus of utopian fiction, several thousand temporal comparisons were identified, to find an answer on the question what functions the temporal comparisons fulfill. With the five centuries of modern utopian fiction in mind, also questions about the narration techniques within the history of the genre had to be raised (utopia/dystopia/temporalization) and what these changes do with the temporal comparisons. On the basis of this preparatory work, this article proposes two prototypes of temporal comparisons—the synchronization of different temporalities and the actualization of memory.