Two Faculty of Arts Ph.D. students will present a paper during the next event in the series 'Utopian Futures - Utopian Pasts? 500 Years after Thomas More's Utopia (1516)', organised by the Departments of English, German and Philosophy.
date: Thursday, 20 October
time: 18:00
venue: Faculty of Arts Library
date: Thursday, 20 October
time: 18:00
venue: Faculty of Arts Library
Imperfect Ambassadors in a Perfect Realm? More's Anemolian Ambassadors and Contemporary Treatises on the Ambassador
Adrian Scerri (Department of History)
This paper seeks to compare and contrast More’s depiction of the ambassadors of a perfect realm with how his contemporary theorists portray their ‘perfect ambassador’.
The problem with perfection is that it is so alien to human nature that any human attempt to portray it will fall short of its target. ‘To have the perfect ambassador you must have first the perfect prince’ Torquato Tasso had said. And a book entitled ‘Utopia’ would seem to offer both. But yet More is strangely restrained in his treatment of ambassadors. He mentions how ambassadors are chosen 'Out of these [the scholars] they choose their ambassadors…', but precious little else.
We learn that the ambassadors are served with food from the surplus of the market. In the next mention, ambassadors seem to serve as a prop for More to denigrate the love of luxury and ostentation. The Anemolian ambassadors, a nation ignorant of the ways of the Utopians, were arrayed in splendour and finery, only to earn the scorn rather than the admiration of their hosts.
More had been on a diplomatic mission and knew the ways of courts. It seems that the Anemolians would fit the description of his contemporaries' 'perfect ambassador'. It is what this paper will strive to discover.
'...Nothing is tragic': Politics and the Teleological Will-to-Hope
James Farrugia (Department of English)
This paper involves taking soteriology in tandem with political theology in a reading that discerns the historical and contemporary individual’s relation to society and state as the fundamental starting point of political life and projection. In other words, soteriological political theology will be viewed as the political will-to-hope. From such an ameliorative will arises the necessary kinetic tension to either attempt to initiate or bring into actuality part of an envisioned political project, or to bring yet closer still an assumed teleological end-point of the same worked-for project, at which stage salvation/redemption might finally be assumed into the aspect of political and existential being. The paper’s core assertion is that the ubiquity of this saving impulse as fashioned into various political systems lies at the heart of the individual’s relation to society and state, and that it is, ultimately, a negative one.