News from Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Literature
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
From the Biblical Eden, to Buddhist Purelands, and to experimental communities, the dream of the perfect society has lain at the heart – and in the founding – of every great civilisation, culture, nation, and religion. Yet, these imagined models of social organisation almost always embody conflicting interpretations and controversial assertions of order, justice, equality, happiness, citizenship, and the highest good. More paradoxically, these imaginary constructs of socio-political configuration are often chimeric crossings of utopia (from οὐ for “not” and τόπος for “place”) and eutopia (from εὖ for “good” and τόπος for “place”). Though first coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516, the first substantive articulation of utopia in Western discourse can be traced to Plato’s Republic and his famed story of Atlantis in the dialogues of Timaeus and Critias. Already then, we can see a fertile crossing between philosophy, political science, sociology, economics, religion, geography, ethics, fiction, and travel writing in these seminal texts of utopian literature. From a strictly literary perspective, the evolution and proliferation of utopian writing since More’s publication of Utopia have not only contributed to the invention of the modern novel (namely, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), but they have also muddled and diversified the genre to include a host of paradisal and infernal “places” (eutopia, euchronia, hyperutopia, satirical utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, the list goes on). Still, the all-too-human hopes and aspirations, failings and delusions, underlying the heady array of utopian visions are undeniably real, whose effects, for better or worse, continue to ripple to this day (e.g. Hitler’s National Socialism, the Soviet Iron Curtain, Mao’s Cultural Revolution). In this year-long unit, we will survey a wide historical spread of utopian literature: from Plato’s dialogues, to More’s Renaissance narrative and Swift’s eighteenth-century satires, to such classics as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), and finally Margaret Atwood’s provocative The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). At the same time, this literary survey will be accompanied by a careful assessment of T. R. Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848), J. S. Mill’s Chapters on Socialism (1879), E. M. Cioran’s History and Utopia (1960), and other relevant materials.
READING TEXTS:
I. Primary
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale, McClelland and Stewart, 1985.
Cioran, E. M. “Mechanism of Utopia” and “The Golden Age.” History and Utopia, translated by Richard Howard, Arcade Publishing, 1987, pp. 80-118.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World, Vintage Canada, 2007.
Malthus, T. R. An Essay on the Principle of Population, edited by Geoffrey Gilbert, Oxford UP, 1993.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto, edited by David McLellan, Oxford UP, 1992.
Mill, J. S. John Stuart Mill: On Liberty with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, edited by Stefan Collini, Cambridge UP, 1989, pp. 219-279.
More, Thomas, Francis Bacon and Henry Neville. Three Early Modern Utopias: Utopia, New Atlantis and The Isle of Pines, edited by Susan Bruce, Oxford UP, 1999.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin Books, 2008.
Plato. The Republic, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford UP, 1994.
— Timaeus and Critias, translated by Robin Waterfield, Oxford UP, 2008.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Claude Rawson, Oxford UP, 2005.
— “A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents.” Jonathan Swift: Major Works, edited by Angus Ross and David Woolley, Oxford UP, 2003, 492-99.
II. Secondary
Claeys, Gregory. “The Caveman’s Century: The Development of Totalitarianism from Jacobinism to Stalinism.” Dystopia: A Natural History, Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 113-176.
— “Totalitarianism from Hitler to Pol Pot.” Dystopia: A Natural History, Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 177-268.
Vieira, Fatima. “The concept of utopia.” The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, edited by Gregory Claeys, Cambridge UP, 2010, pp. 3-27.