123422 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English/American (2017W)

Plato's The Republic, which discusses the organisation of an ideal state and government, marks the beginning of Western traditions of utopian fiction, which - in the English context - is famously taken up during the Early Modern period by Thomas More's Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1626). Etymologically, 'utopia' combines the non-existing ('ou' = Greek for 'non'; topos = Greek for 'place') with good ('eu' = Greek for 'good'). As a genre, it also gave birth to its opposite: 'dystopias' are fantasies of bad places, of things gone wrong, of destructive constellations, noxious or even toxic environments and oppressive structures. As discursive products, they express collective anxieties prevalent at the respective historical moments.
In this course we are going to concentrate on 20th and 21st century dystopias, starting by bracketing this period with discussions of E.M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" (1909) and the beginning of the TV-series Broken Mirror (2011). Apart from these, we are going to analyse four novels (Brave New World, 1984, Never Let Me Go, The Handmaid's Tale: points ride on text knowledge quizzes, so make sure to allow yourselves time to read these), three films (Gattaca, The Matrix, V for Vendetta) and one TV series (The Handmaid's Tale), which represent major strands of dystopian fiction that focus on totalitarianism; the human/machine dichotomy; surveillance and biopower (reproduction; organ donation).
The revived interest in the dystopian genre - Orwell's and Atwood's novels occupied top place in Amazon's bestseller list for a while earlier this year - needs to be read against the backdrop of recent events in the Anglo-American political arena. Currently, especially The Handmaid's Tale proves to be an inspiration: adaptations include a film (Schlöndorff), an opera (Ruders/Bentley), a ballet (York), a graphic novel (Nault) and an art installation (Scher/Miller) on New York's High Line (https://ny.curbed.com/2017/4/27/15449484/handmaids-tale-hulu-high-line-art-installation). During the past few months, cosplay activists in the US have, moverover, taken to protesting against misogynist state legislation 'in character', that is, wearing while 'handmaid's costumes' (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/us/handmaids-protests-abortion.html). As this example indicates, dystopias speak most urgently to readers/viewers at the moment, and this course aims to harness the energy freed by this vibrant ongoing cultural activity.