Course info

Recent years have seen a growing interest in utopia in literary and cultural studies. As literary critic Fredric Jameson writes in Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), the notion of utopia may today refer to: (1) “the written text or genre”, (2) “a Utopian impulse detectable in daily life”, and (3) “political practice” (1). Utopia as genre is further defined, by Jameson, as a sub-genre of science fiction that is “specifically devoted to the imagination of alternative social and economic forms” (xiv). While these three senses overlap significantly, this seminar will focus on utopia as genre, looking at two central literary texts.

At first, we will delve into the foundational text of the utopian genre, namely Thomas More’s On the Best State of a Commonwealth and on the New Island of Utopia (1516). Given our own historical distance from the text, we will familiarise ourselves sufficiently with the social, literary, political and philosophical contexts that impinge on More’s Utopia. At the same time, we will dedicate much time to textual analysis, exploring Utopia’s forms – e.g. its satirical discourse, its travel narrative, its construction of an imaginary/spatial enclave (note that More’s Greek neologism ‘utopia’ literally translates to ‘no-place’ in English, but also puns on ‘eutopia’ – ‘good-place’ respectively). However, there will of course also be room to discuss the ideas proposed by More, his utopian contents, such as the abolition of money and private property, as well as the abolition of privacy as we know it. With recourse both to our own textual analysis of the primary text and to canonical secondary texts, we will then develop strategies of reading utopian literature, a ‘toolkit’ of helpful concepts so to speak.

In the following part of the seminar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) will take us into a feminist (e)utopia, an all-female, egalitarian civilisation (that likewise knows no money or private property in our sense of the term). Again, we will familiarise ourselves with the contexts of this text, most notably the women’s movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, before we delve into textual analysis, using the strategies and concepts developed previously. And again, there will be room for a controversial discussion of the ideas proposed by Gilman, e.g. the abolition of femininity and masculinity as we know it, or the abolition of a gendered division of labour as is still more or less commonplace a hundred years after Gilman published Herland.