| My dissertation explores the influence of Lucian's Menippean satires on Renaissance rhetoric. "Dystopia" is the term I use to describe duplicitous and paradoxical uses of satiric rhetoric that underscore the entropic status of the subject. While "dystopia" is a nineteenth-century creation, I argue that its history can be traced back to Lucian, who is acutely aware of the dangers of dogmatic speech, and therefore calls each subject a dystopian "liar." In close readings of Lucian's A True History, Hermotimus, and selections from his Dialogues of the Dead, I provide a framework within which discussions of the Renaissance dystopia might take place. Paradoxical infusions of Skeptic and Cynic theories in Lucian's narratives influence Rabelais, Montaigne and a lesser-known writer, Artus Thomas. While Rabelais revels in irreverent and destabilizing readings of Scholastic rhetoric and Scripture, Montaigne explores dystopian subjective entropy as part of his greater investment in the paradoxical nature of doubt. In L'Isle des hermaphrodites, Artus Thomas underscores the importance of the feminine position in the dystopian project, which has been somewhat ignored by his male predecessors, while exploring the position of the "liar." I therefore address the Renaissance writer's rejection of e/utopian dogmatism, and demonstrate how each writer often works within the dominant hermeneutic paradigms of his time to propose subversive approaches to scriptural authorities, and to Renaissance conceptions of truth, morality, mortality, and gender stability. |
