Roads to Utopia
Block 3, 2009-10, Utrecht University
Lecture 1:Course Overview
Barnita Bagchi
B.Bagchi@uu.nl
• This course takes you into the world of utopian
fiction, spanning the period from the sixteenth
century to the twentieth century.
• We look at prose narrative fiction.
• Texts are from three continents: Europe, North
America, and Asia.
• We look at the literary design of texts that ask
fundamental and adventurous questions about
society, politics, sexuality, nature, culture and
science.
This lecture
• Has 2 parts: the first part offers a Course
Overview. About the practical aspects of
the course: the texts you will read, the
papers and presentations you will make.
• The second part of the lecture introduces
Utopia as a resonant mode in literature
and thought.
Our Primary Texts
•
•
1. Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2130
•
•
2. William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)
Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3261
•
•
3. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana’s Dream (1905)
Online at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html
•
•
4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/32
•
•
5. Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Orion, 1999)
Ordered at Selexyz, please buy.
•
6. While it is not compulsory to buy it, the following book is a superb anthology of utopian writing.
Browsing through this will give you a very good sense of the lie of the lands known as Utopia! I
recommend that you buy this paperback, also ordered at Selexyz.
•
Gregory Claeys & Lyman Tower Sargent eds. The Utopia Reader, New York University Press,
1999. Paperback.
More’s Utopia
• As a foundational text, Thomas More’s
Utopia is compulsory for you to read.
• Your group seminar presentations will be
on this text. See Course-Manual.
• Examine the treatment of space/ place,
OR time OR politics OR social
organization (including gender) in Thomas
More’s Utopia.
• Groups: to be formed.
Mid-Term Paper
• Please show knowledge of two texts, in addition to More’s Utopia, in
your mid-term and final paper, taken together.
• The mid-term paper has the following topic:
Examine the interplay between the desired/ the good/ the ideal and
the impossible/ the dream (or nightmare)/ the fantasy in two of our
prescribed texts.
1000-1500 words.
You need to submit your papers on 10 March.
In hard copy.
Final Paper
• Choose a topic by March 20. Let me know
what your topic is by email, and get it
approved by me.
• Submit your paper on April 6.
• 3000 words.
• In hard copy.
Presentations
• The first presentations will take place on
24 February.
No Class on 10
February.
Time to start reading.
In particular, please read More’s
Utopia.
Utopia
•
•
•
•
Pun in the word, in Greek.
Eu-topia: the good place.
Ou-topia: no place.
The good, the desired, the ideal, the just,
the pleasing.
• No place: a dream, an impossibility, a
fantasy.
Utopia and Dystopia
• If utopia is the good dream, then dystopia is the
nightmare.
• 1984 or Animal Farm by George Orwell are
dystopia. In our course, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep verges on dystopia.
• To some readers, even a description of utopia
can feel like a description of dystopia. Think of
this in relation to More’s Utopia.
Utopia is a Way of Thinking and
Imagining: A Mode
• Although the genre of utopian fiction was
invented by Sir Thomas More, once he wrote his
book, it became easy to see that people had
been writing in the utopian mode since time
immemorial.
• Plato’s The Republic, Ovid’s description of the
Golden Age in the Metamorphoses, Virgil’s
Fourth Eclogue, the Biblical Garden of Eden,
and the related trope of the hortus conclusus or
enclosed garden are all examples of the utopian
mode.
Topos
• A place. Space. Description of the
geography, and the spatial contours: this is
perhaps the very first thing to analyse in
utopian fictions.
• Topos: a literary or rhetorical term. A
standardised method of constructing or
treating an argument, in classical rhetoric.
Topos
• The rhetorical term was expanded to
mean commonplaces, or standardised
ways of describing things, especially
settings or places.
• For example, the hortus conclusus, or
enclosed garden, is a literary topos, as
well as literally describing a place, or topos
in another sense.
Hortus Conclusus
• From Song of Solomon, 4:12, “A garden
enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden
enclosed, a fountain sealed up.”
• This was then applied metaphorically to the
Virgin Mary, but also literalised in innumerable
descriptions and paintings of beautiful enclosed
gardens with a fountain at the centre.
• This is a very good example of the utopian mode
of thought, well before More’s Utopia.
Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (later called
the Messianic Eclogue)
• Next, when now the strength of the years has made thee
man, even the trader shall quit the sea, nor shall the ship of
pine exchange wares; every land shall bear all fruits. The
earth shall not feel the harrow, nor the vine the pruning
hook; the sturdy ploughman, too, shall now loose his oxen
from the yoke. Wool shall no more learn to counterfeit varied
hues, but of himself the ram in the meadows shall change
his fleece, now to sweetly blushing purple, now to saffron
yellow; of its own shall scarlet clothe the grazing lamb.
•
Translated by Henry Rushton Fairclough, London: Heinemann, 1916.
• Held to presage Christianity: the utopia of Christianity.
• Repose from hard labour.
Plato, The Republic
• For utopian writing, ‘the most Important
step is to imagine that every aspect of
social order is susceptible to human
control, thus creating an entirely new
tradition—utopias of human contrivance,
often cast in the form of the imaginary city.
Plato’s The Republic is the earliest
influential example. More’s Utopia is
squarely in this tradition.’ Sargent and Claeys, The
Utopia Reader, p. 3.
The Republic
• About whether it is better to be just or unjust. Dialogue,
Socratic in nature, in some respects.
• There are in Plato’s just society philosophers, warriors,
and commoners.
• Plato thinks that the soul has three parts, which
correspond to three different kinds of interests, three
kinds of virtues, three kinds of personalities.
• Reason-knowledge-spirit, corresponding to knowledgehonour-pleasure, corresponding to philosopherswarriors-commoners.
• The philosophers and warriors are the ‘Guardians’ of this
ideal society.
The Republic
• The guardians must live in poverty, and hold possessions in
common.
• Children will be raised in common. They will not know who their
parents are.
• ‘Breeding the best’: a Breeding Committee rigs a lottery in which
people appear to draw lots. In fact, those considered unfit for
breeding will only draw blanks: a rigged system.
• Women can be Guardians.
• Women can be at the battlefield, even if not at the forefront of battle.
• Women can be athletes. Gymnos: means naked. So women can in
Plato’s society be athletes in the requisite nakedness.
The Republic
•
•
•
•
•
An austere, tough society.
In Bk VII, Plato gives us the allegory of the Cave.
We are prisoners in a cave wherea fire is burning.
We see shadows on the wall, and think that is reality.
But there is an exit from the cave: once we get out, we
realize we were living in a world of darkness and
shadows. Outside is the bright light of truth. This too
works in the mode of dystopia: the cave, and the bright
world outside the cave: utopia
More’s Utopia
• Having digested the Christian and
classical traditions, Thomas More,
churchman and eventual martyr (opposed
Henry VIII’s version of staroyalty and
state-controlled religion), wrote in Latin
Utopia in 1516.
A genre came into being.