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Spring 2013 First-Year Seminar BC1291 section 001 UTOPIAS | |
| Call Number | 06018 |
| Day & Time Location |
MW 11:40am-12:55pm 502 Diana Center |
| Points | 3 |
| Approvals Required | None |
| Instructor | Gale L Kenny |
| Type | SEMINAR |
| Course Description | In his 1516 work Utopia, Englishman Thomas More created a name for a perfect society from Greek roots meaning either no-place or the good place (eutopia). More's vision of an ideal alternative world reflected his worries about social problems in England as well as the possibilities he imagined in America, which offered a real new world for most Europeans in the early 1500s. More was neither the first nor last person to imagine an alternate world, and this class will examine the ways writers, politicians, social critics, and revolutionaries have constructed eutopias (or good societies) as well as dystopias (bad societies) in fiction and in real life. We will ask how utopian fiction has developed as a distinctive genre, and we will also ask how utopian thought is a product of its particular time. What motivates writers and thinkers to come up with alternative models of society? What has made utopian fiction and science fiction so interesting to so many different kinds of writers? Additionally, what is the relationship between people who have written fictional visions of the future and those people who have tried to create real utopian societies? Can one person's eutopia become another's dystopia? Readings in the class will range from Plato's Republic through modern science fiction and studies of surbubia. Texts include More's Utopia, Columbus's journals, Shakespeare's The Tempest, the Communist Manifesto, Gilman's Herland, and Hopkins's Of One Blood. We will also examine attempts to create utopias, including several American experimental communes from the early 1800s, nationalist racial dystopias such as Nazi Germany, and master-planned communities in the modern United States. |
| Web Site | CourseWorks |
| Department | First-Year Seminar Program @Barnard |
| Enrollment | 16 students as of 11:48PM Thursday, May 23, 2013 |
| Subject | First-Year Seminar |
| Number | BC1291 |
| Section | 001 |
| Division | Barnard College |
| Open To | Barnard |
| Campus | Barnard College |
| Section key | 20131FYSB1291X001 |
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