Nebulous Utopias. From “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” to “China Dream”. The Use of Catchwords and Slogans in Constructing Imaginary Utopian/Dystopian Communities

In Richard III, Act 3, young Prince Edward’s insistent questiThe paper offers a preliminary study of a phenomenon that could be termed nebulous utopia, an attempt to project an image of the ideal state based on the use of catchwords and slogans. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their extensive use, originally limited mainly to totalitarian states and war propaganda, has become the dominant rhetorical device employed by a wide range of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements aimed at winning popular support by appealing to a set of vaguely defined general values and objectives. ons about the origins of the Tower of London bring the issue of historical transmission to the foreground. Furthermore, the survival of truth across time is thematised throughout the first tetralogy. References to fame recur obsessively in the three parts of Henry VI, while in Richard III, Shakespeare subtly plays with a historical and historiographical tradition that is much indebted to memorial transmission. In this play, historical distortion is materialised in the deformed body of its protagonist, who becomes the emblem of a past reinterpreted and rewritten in the light of present interests. The article will show how, on the one hand, the dramatist goes beyond what already was a “vituperative history” and brings the so-called Tudor myth to its apex while, on the other hand, undermining this same myth.