Utopiens grænser i Den amerikanske revolution

Mikkel Birk Jespersen: "Utopiens grænser i Den amerikanske revolution - Om utopiske tekststrategier i Common Sense og Letters from an American Farmer"AbstractMikkel Birk Jespersen: “Boundaries of Utopia in the American Revolution: On Utopian Text Strategies in Common Sense and Letters from an American Farmer”The article discusses the relations between utopia, literature and revolution in the American Revolution through an analysis of Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). It is arguedthat utopia constitutes a textual function whose ‘non-place’ or ‘point zero’ is not reducible to a political logic, but rather presents a challenge to it. In the revolution, however, the different logics of utopia and of the political can be said to confront each other, hereby illuminating the contradictions of both. The constellation of the two texts brings out the contradictory nature of utopia, as the texts have opposed approaches to the revolution and are characterised by two different utopian logics.