Locus Amoenus

The erudite, Flemish novelist-critic, Stefan Hertmans, gave a brilliant lecture in Ghent on Monday in the lecture series on literature and philosophy that I helped put together. He related Utopian thought to the rhetorical commonplace Locus Amoenus (i.e., pleasant place). He took us to Ovid, More, Holderlin, Nabokov among others. One of his main claims (if I understood him correctly) was that (modern) literature situates itself in a situably problematicized locus amoenus and, in doing so, is temporarlily outside the polity and the clutches of the philosophers. This seems to be right, if we reflect on, say, Coetzee's recent writings (in which place, no-place, and pleasant places are obsessively investigated). In Q&A it occurred to me that in the Phaedrus, Plato kind of animates (?) and investigates the very idea of a Locus Amoenus. (The wikipedia link fails to mention Plato in this context. It is rare I kvetch about wikipedia.) So (?), to travel to a locus amoenus is, as it were, an attempt to go to the place of (inspired) philosophy. I'll return to such musings (and hopefully develop some clearer thoughts on it) on a regular basis.