Course Description

This course takes as its theme works which illustrate imaginary societies functioning beyond some sort of “Utopian trench.” Since 1516, when Thomas More’s fictional king Utopus cut a defensive channel between his island of “high culture” and a nearby continent teeming with the “uncouth” and the “rude,” utopian writers (or, as Frederic Jameson calls them, “crackpots”) have continued to hypothesize the advantages and disadvantages of a great divide between the what-is and the what-might-be. Most of the works we’ll look at in this course examine twentieth-century societies that have gone wrong, especially when individual freedom is concerned. These texts, which form part of the utopian sub-genre called “anti-utopias” or “dystopias,” depict societies and individuals that suffer, for instance, the daily spiritual acidity of oppressive, totalitarian systems; or they may fight androids for survival on a post-apocalyptic radioactive earth; or, as inhabitants of a not-too-distant future, they may be burdened by a withering physical and mental atrophy; or, worse yet, they witness the utter victory of an unquenchable consumerist capitalism.

We’ll be looking at several motifs in each of these texts: the nature and genesis of “the trench”; tensions arising between forces of the particular and the universal; characterization and representation of individuals and individual response given such context; the resonance between the oppressive forces in the fiction we’re reading and the “reality” we posit we’re living; instances of quirky self-revelation on the part of the author; and, more generally, the written representation of dystopian imagination as it plays out in human relations, religion, gender, art, music, education, and science.

Since this is a second year, Introduction to Literature course, you are not expected to bring specialized information to this class. All I ask you to do is read every wordof the assignments and think about them so that when we get together as a class, you will have questions to ask and ideas to share. Our classes in the English department are relatively small because we expect and depend upon interested and animated conversation between professors and all students. I call on everybody, a lot.As I do this, I hope that you, in turn, will both express yourselves better and listen better to others by the end of the course. To encourage you to read closely, I will give many easy, announced quizzes. If you’ve read the assignments well, you’ll know the answers.

Through the semester, you will contribute weekly to an informal on-line class forum on our Laulima page. You will do two written presentations of your summary of a published article about a course text. You will belong to a five-student team which will lead in-class discussions six times. Since the course has a “writing intensive” designation (W), we will spend a small part of our time together reviewing some of the basics of essay composition and the basics of writing about literature: refining a thesis, structuring an essay, using various rhetorical modes, formatting, etc. In response to topic questions I’ll give you on the readings we do for class, you will write and rewrite five four-page essays. We will workshop these essays in class in order to refine our skills of attentive reading and listening, of giving and receiving feedback. The course final exam will be a take-home essay (a rewrite of the fifth of our five essays) which will give you the chance to integrate and reflect upon the various critical approaches we will have explored throughout the semester.

A last note: Sinclair Library’s Wong Center has filmed versions of at least four of our course texts: The Time Machine, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Blade Runner(from the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)and Total Recall(from the story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale).As we do the essays for these works, you will have the choice of writing a comparison/contrast essay on the two versions. (We’ll have some brief readings on filmed interpretation of literary works.)

Required Texts (available at the campus bookstore)

Thomas More: Utopia (Norton Critical 2nd Ed. ISBN 0393961451); H. G. Wells: The Time Machine (Signet Classic ISBN 0451528557); Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

(Harper Perennial Modern Classics (ISBN-10: 0060929871); George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (ISBN-10: 0452284236); Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (ISBN-10: 0194792226); Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (Penguin Classics ISBN 9780140185850)

Other texts (short stories and excerpts from longer works, approximately 300 pages in all) will be available for downloading and printing from our Laulima Web site.