This lecture

1. Roads to UtopiaBlock 3, 2009-10, Utrecht UniversityLecture 1:Course OverviewBarnita BagchiB.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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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 knowledge-honour-pleasure, corresponding to philosophers-warriors-commoners. • The philosophers and warriors are the ‘Guardians’ of this ideal society.

18. 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.

19. 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

20. 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.