This course explores the intimate relationship between creativity and utopia, as it is played out in literary and theoretical texts across the twentieth century. It examines the extent to which the art work can create new worlds (brave or otherwise), and traces the historical changes in the utopian function of literature from modernism to the present day.
The relationship between creativity and utopia will be explored both through the reading of several key utopian texts, and through reflections on the practice of creative writing.
Titles in bold are required reading for the week.
Some Utopias
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
Voltaire, Candide
Samuel Butler, Erewhon
Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Elizabeth Corbett, New Amazonia
H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come , A Modern Utopia
Lord Lytton, The Coming Race
Mary Shelley, The Last Man
Margaret Atwood,
The Handmaid’s Tale
Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (particularly 'Economy', in course reader).
Nathanael Hawthorne, Blithedale Romance
See also Mary Ellen Snodgrass, The Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature
Some titles to gesture towards the ongoing debate in Marxism about the role of creativity in articulating or imagining utopias
Herbert Marcuse, ‘The End of Utopia’, in Herbert Marcuse,
Five Lectures:
Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia
, particularly ‘The Utopian Mentality’
Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, ‘On Literature as an Ideological form’, in eg.
Untying the Text

Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in eg.
Essays on Ideology
Ernst Fischer, Art Against Ideology
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
Some general theoretical works on Utopia
Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical
Theory
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe , particularly ‘Afterward’
Francis Fukyama, The End of History and the Last Man
Robert C. Elliott, The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre
Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia
Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World
Manuel, ed. Utopias and Utopian Thought
Krishan Kumar, Utopianism , and Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Tmes
Zygmunt Bauman, 'Utopia with no Topos', in Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Seige
Claeys and Sargent, eds., The Utopia Reader
Gregory Claeys, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature
Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: the Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern
Jacques Derrida, 'Not utopia, the im-possible', in Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine
Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time
Frederic Jameson, 'Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture', in Social Text I (Winter,
1979), pp. 130-148
Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial PLay

Summary reading list:
Week One
Introductory week
Week Two
Thomas Moore, Utopia
Stephen Greenblatt, 'Utopian Pleasure', in Cummings and Simpson, eds.,. Cultural
Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History
Week Three
HG Wells, The Time Machine
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900
(particularly Chapter 1, 'History and Utopia at the
Fin de Siècle
)
Week Four
Theodor Adorno, 'Aldous Huxley and Utopia', in Prisms
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell, 1984
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Week Five
Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, 'Something's Missing', in Ernst Bloch, The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature (photocopy provided)
Samuel Beckett The Lost Ones
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Week Six
Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, 'Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/ Forays'
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen
Elizabeth Bowen, 'The Back Drawing Room', in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth
Bowen
Week Seven
Writing/Reading Week
Week Eight
Jacques Derrida, 'Passions: An Oblique Offering'
Henry James, 'The Figure in the Carpet'
Henry James, 'The Middle Years'
Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu
Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall'
Week Nine
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
E.M. Forster, 'The Story of a Panic'
Leo Bersani, 'Sociality and Sexuality'
Week ten
Franz Kafka, The Castle, ' Metamorphosis', 'The Burrow'.
Maurice Blanchot, 'Kafka and the Work's Demand', in The Space of Literature
Frederic Jameson, ‘Modernism, Utopia and Death’ in The Seeds of Time

Week Eleven
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Samuel Beckett, 'Imagination Dead Imagine'
Week twelve
Conclusions

Week 1
Introduction
Week 2: The Poetry of the Future
Thomas Moore, Utopia
Stephen Greenblatt, 'Utopian Pleasure', in Cummings and Simpson, eds.,. Cultural
Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (particularly
Chapter 1, 'At the Table of the Great', photocopy available)
Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
George Logan, 'Introduction', in Thomas More, Utopia , eds. Gorge Logan and Robert
Adams
J.H. Hexter, More's Utopia: The Biography of an Idea
Edward Surtz, The praise of Wisdom: A Commentary on the Religious and Moral
Problems and Backgrounds of St Thomas More's 'Utopia'
Week 3: Victorian Utopianism and the Backward Gaze
HG Wells, The Time Machine
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd.: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-
1900 (particularly Chapter 1, 'History and Utopia at the Fin de Siècle, photocopy provided)
William Morris, News From Nowhere
HG Wells, A Modern Utopia
HG Wells, The Shape of Things to Come
William Morris, 'More's Utopia : Foreword by William Morris'
William Morris, 'Architecture and History'
William Morris, 'The Dawn of a New Epoch'
Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future : H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy
Mark Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare : H.G. Wells and the anti-Utopians
Week 4: Utopia, Dystopia and Freedom
Theodor Adorno, 'Aldous Huxley and Utopia', in Prisms
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell, 1984
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Frederic Jameson, 'The Politics of Utopia' , in the New Left Reviw , vol 25, Jan/Feb 2004
Hannah Arendt, 'Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government', in Irving Howe, ed., Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
David L Kubal, Outside the Whale: George Orwell's Art and Politics
Peter Ruppert, 'The Anti-Utopia: the Necessity of History', in Peter Ruppert, Reader in a
Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Utopias
E.J. Brown, Brave New World, 1984, and We: An Essay on Anti-Utopia
Salman Rushdie, 'Outside the Whale', in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
Raymond Williams, Orwell
Isaac Deutscher, '1984 - The Mysticism of Cruelty', in Williams, ed., George Orwell: A
Collection of Critical Essays
Martin Esslin, 'Television and Telescreen', in Stansky, ed., On Nineteen Eighty-Four
Lionel Trilling, 'George Orwell and the Politics of Truth', in Irving Howe, ed., Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
David Bradshaw, ed., The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses
Week 5: Something's Missing
Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, 'Something's Missing', in Ernst Bloch, The
Utopian Function of Art and Literature (photocopy provided)
Samuel Beckett The Lost Ones
J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function in Art and Literature
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
Joseph Long, 'Divine Intertextuality: Samuel Beckett, Company, Le Dépeupleur , in
Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui , no. 9
Garin Dowd, 'Figuring Zero in the Lost Ones', in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui , no.
9
Sylvie Debevec Henning, Beckett’s Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation and
Tradition
Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel:
Still Lives
Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen
Edwin Kennedy, Elizabeth Bowen
Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer
Phyllis Lassner, Elizabeth Bowen
Week 6: : Ways Out: Utopia and Feminism
Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, 'Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/
Forays'

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen
Elizabeth Bowen, 'The Back Drawing Room', in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth
Bowen
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Utopian Novels
Ann J. Lane, The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader
Lorna Sage, Doris Lessing
Lorna Sage, ‘Lessing and Atopia’, in Kaplan and Cronan, eds.,
Doris Lessing: the
Alchemy of Survival
Elizabeth Maslen, Doris Lessing
Louise Yelin, From the Margins of Empire: Christine Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine
Gordimer
Monique Wittig,
Les Guérillères
(in French)
Nan Bowman Albinski, Women’s Utopias in British and American Fiction
Jones and Goodwin, eds., Feminism, Utopia and Narrative
Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias
Polly Wynn Allen, Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Architectural
Feminism
Week 7: Reading/Writing week
Week 8: Utopian Economies of Reading
Jacques Derrida, 'Passions: An Oblique Offering'
Henry James, 'The Figure in the Carpet'
Henry James, 'The Middle Years'
Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu
Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall'
J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, in
Poetics Today
J. Hillis Miller, ‘Re-Reading Re-Vision: James and Benjamin’, in Hillis Miller,
The
Ethics of Reading
Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James
Sara Chapman,
Henry James’s Portrait of the Writer as Hero
Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, in Henry James,
The Critical Muse: Selected Literary
Criticism
Jonathan Freedman, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Henry James
Harold Bloom, ed., Henry James: Modern Critical Views
S. Gontarski,
The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic texts
Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, in
Mythologies

Diana Knight, Barthes and Utopia: Space, Travel, Writing
Week 9: Utopian Sexualities
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
E.M. Forster, 'The Story of a Panic'
Leo Bersani, 'Sociality and Sexuality'
Nicholas Royle, E.M. Forster
Robert K. Martin and George Piggford, Queer Forster
Jeremy Tambling, ed., E.M. Forster
Alex Zwerdling, V irginia Woolf and the Real World
Su Ried, ed., Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse
Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf
Harold Bloom, ed., Clarissa Dalloway
Jane Dunn, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: A Very Close Conspiracy
Laura Marcus, Virginia Woolf
Sue Roe,
Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice
Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf
Week 10: Negativity and Utopia
Viewing of Orson Welles, The Trial
Franz Kafka, The Castle, 'Metamorphosis', 'The Burrow'.
Maurice Blanchot, 'Kafka and the Work's Demand', in The Space of Literature
Frederic Jameson, ‘Modernism, Utopia and Death’ in The Seeds of Time
Roland Barthes, ‘Kafka’s Answer’, in Hamalian, ed.,
Franz Kafka: A Collection of
Criticism
Albert Camus, ‘Hope and the Absurd in the world of Franz Kafka, in Gray, ed.,
Kafka: A
Collection of Critical Essays
Max Brod, ‘
The Castle : Its Genesis’, and following essays, in Flores and Swander, Franz
Kafka Today
Hannah Arendt, ‘Frank Kafka’, and Ernst Fischer, ‘Kafka Conference’, in Hughes, ed.,
Franz Kafka: An Anthology of Marxist Criticism
Theodor Adorno, ‘Notes on Kafka’, Walter Benjamin, ‘Some Reflections on Kafka’,
Erich Heller, ‘The Castle’, and Heinrich Henel, ‘”The Burrow”, or How to Escape from a
Maze’, and Heinz Politzer, ‘The Wall of Secrecy: Kafka’s
Castle
’, in Bloom, ed.,
Franz
Kafka: Modern Critical Views
Anthony Thorlby, Kafka: A Study
Douglas Kellner, ed., Postmodernism - Jameson - Critique
Week 11: Ecotopias

Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Samuel Beckett, Imagination Dead Imagine
Richard Powers, 'The Seventh Event'
Ken Kearney, 'Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the Frontier of the Human', in LIT , 23,
2.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Laurence Buell, The Environmental Imagination
Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature
Ursula Heise, Sense of Place, Sense of the Planet
Week 12:
Conclusions