English Free topic C: Writing Tomorrow: The Literature of Utopias and Dystopias

Course Description

How do writers imagine perfect societies, and what makes them envision worlds gone wrong? This course explores the rich tradition of utopian and dystopian literature, with special attention to how these genres reflect and critique technological advancement, gender norms, the abuse of nature, and media propaganda.

One part of the course focuses on American female utopian writers that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine, among others, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland as a controversial “feminist” vision of a good Anthropocene and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as a critical utopian vision of gender equality through anarchism. These works will facilitate a larger discussion of the complicated – maybe even impossible – nature of utopia. We will also draw lines of comparison to male utopias of the time like Edward Bellamy’s seminal novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887.

The other part of the course deals with influential dystopian works that continue to resonate with contemporary concerns. We will examine George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four through the lens of mass media manipulation and surveillance, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as an early exploration of the threat posed by AI, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as a dark vision of what gender oppression may lead to in a religiously conservative America.

In terms of critical texts, we will choose texts that offer an overview of utopian and dystopian literatures and discourses, as well as texts pertaining to particular visions within the genres. Among the texts are Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature and Lyman Tower Sargent’s Rethinking Utopia and Utopianism: The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited and Other Essays.