123211 VO Literatures in English (2014S)

Since the early accounts of discovery and exploration of the New World the imagination of European writers has been fired by the possibility of finding an Edenic place or of founding a utopian community on the other side of the Atlantic. The accounts of real or imaginary travels composed by Anglophone authors from Thomas More onwards present alternative societies which simultaneously reflect such desires and reveal the shortcomings of the society at home.
The lecture course will survey texts that reflect the perennial human desire to discover or construct such alternative societies. It will include a discussion of the 16th century classic of the genre, More, Utopia, and of some comparable societies reached in fictional extraordinary voyages; and will then focus on 19th and 20th century North American accounts of such societies.
The 19th century saw the attempted realization of 'utopian'; projects ranging from ascetic communities to notorious communes and the gradual substitution of the location of such societies in the future rather than in space. The course will contextualize the transformation of the genre by considering the growing social problems in urban North America and the rise of a reform movement but also the introduction of major technological innovations.
Among the texts to be considered will be Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, as well as (briefly) notable feminist texts such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland, and the classic international dystopias such as Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, and George Orwell, 1984. The heyday of dystopian fiction extrapolating from undesirable trends in contemporary society and often including the depiction of post-nuclear worlds and spaces following an ecological disaster but also attempts to prevent such catastrophes or to survive in eschatological situations will be represented by Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia, Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, and Cormac McCarthy, The Road.