LITR 5439 Literary & Historical Utopias

conclude Ecotopia

millennial event

Callenbach, Ecotopia

2 heal the fratricidal breach that rent the nation—so the continent can stand united against rising tides of starvation and revolution.

2 stand-off, helped by national economic crisis

problem of claims / ideals versus practice, work

design course using experiment and experience

p.143

graduate school: professor-student > master-apprentice

professor as professional researcher, sharing special knowledge

students bring diverse backgrounds, interests

idea meets application, students react and guide

best outcome: students become "masters"

real work, but pleasure in learning

some ups and downs, but progress?

best day: last Monday with "Founding Texts"

why? Investment in earlier, longer texts (Utopia, Looking Backward, Herland, Anthem) paid off in smaller texts where "mastery" could be exercised.

Application in 2 summers? > maybe involve some briefer texts earlier, for relief and sense of accomplishment

Instructor's questions on Ecotopia:

multicultural or mono? references to race & ethnicity in Ecotopia.

Defense of character development?

How would you describe the plot? What other texts or narratives are analogous, in this course or beyond?

Pleasures of didactic literature?

compare Herland as "eco-feminism?"

Instructor's comments:

obj. 2 re Utopian Narratives

158 Ecotopian novels

Ecotopia impressive for making public-private, political-personal meet

standard: two separate realms--

public, political--disdain for politics or business

private, personal--enchantment with family life

pp 162-3

+ concluding kidnapping experience fuses personal and social experiences--is he being held against his will, or becoming part of a community?--how much like a cult experience?

173 regard plants as home, own terrain

Thursday, 28 June: conclude Ecotopia

Discussion-starter: Cindy Goodson

Is this Ecotopia

Or Heaven?

Summary:  Ultimately what is the goal, plan or plot of Ecotopia?  To me, its multi-themed: 

1) Callenbach is illustrating the importance of getting high regularly…(kidding)

One of the eco-system’s objectives is to establish a stable state by the implementation of a food cycle in which all food wastes, sewage and garbage are to be turned into organic fertilizer and applied to the land, where it would again enter into the food production cycle.  Which after really thinking about it I thought might not be so bad considering what the asst. minister of foods said during the interview, “If, for instance, we had continued your practice of ‘free’ disposal of waste in water-courses, sooner or later somebody else would have had to calculate (and bear) the costs of the resulting dead rivers and lakes.  We prefer to do it ourselves.”  Pg 18-19.  We know, or should know that we need to just smoke more weed and ingest less insecticides, herbicides and pesticides we’re a totally toxic nation and our economy is concerned about pretty packaged foods – our apples are pretty but just layered with plastic red coating it seems.

What are some other major themes?  Discuss at least two more.  If you don’t speak up I’ll call you out! 

How about San Francisco as a Nation?  How did they establish Independence and become this ‘High-Land’?

Objective Set Up:

1b. What different genres contribute to, interface with, or branch from utopia? Primarily wrt: dystopia, ecotopia, fantasy, novel / romance, adventure / travel narrative. Others?

Consider:  pg 175 wrt Fantasy

We’ve discussed their freeness and here’s a good example:

“The propensity of Ecotopians to touch one another is remarkable.  To most Americans, it is offensive to be touched familiarly by a stranger,…Acquaintances routinely shake hands whenever they meet, even if they have seen each other a few hours before, with novel arm-to-arm clasp.  When people sit down to talk, they snuggle up to each other or interlace arms or legs quite intimately….To us, such behavior is a forbidden fantasy. The Ecotopians act out such fantasies all the time.  They bathe and take steam baths together freely…….Old friends who have not seen each other for some time customarily give each other a warm extended embrace, and occasionally they even excuse themselves and go off to a private place, evidently for sexual purposes.  Naked massage is a common group amusement. 

Any others good examples of obj. 1b? (What different genres contribute to, interface with, or branch from utopia?)

finally….

3f. What social structures, units, or identities does utopia expose or frustrate? What changes result in child-rearing, marriage, aging, sexuality, etc.? (Social units or structures: person/individual/self, gender, sex, family [nuclear or extended], community, village/town/city, class, ethnicity, farm, region, tribe, clan, union, nation, ecosystem, planet.)

Wrt family talk a bit about the sacrificial mock or symbolic crucifixion during the war games: pg 79

Leftover notes from previous classes

utopian novels

lecture on novels (or other literary expressions) in utopian novels

objective 4c. How do literature and literacy appear in utopian or dystopian cultures?

Larger question: What kind of scholarship / research might you undertake with utopian literature?

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Interdisciplinary conferences: Society for Utopian Studies, Center for Millennial Studies

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"Discourse Studies"--cf. "Literature of Ideas" and yesterday's discussion connecting Ecotopia's "social costs" with "social capital" in "Bowling Alone"
--how do literary texts interact with scholarly or popular texts? How are ideas or subjects changed or developed from one text, genre, or period to another?
--Discourse Studies at Texas A&M

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English or Literature Departments, Conferences, Journals

Concentration on texts, forms

Intertextuality: Tracing recurrent phenomena or forms from one text to another, making texts talk to each other

If I were working up a paper or article based on our readings this summer . . . 

"Literary Expressions in Utopian Literature"

Question: How do utopian novels represent novels or other literary genres as parts or expressions of utopian or dystopian communities?

Sub-question: What books or novels do visitors to utopia carry with them?

More's Utopia

34 6 hrs of labor . . .  not to abuse that interval to luxury and idleness, but must employ it in some proper exercise according to their various inclinations, which is for the most part reading.

34 go to hear lectures of one sort or other

46 taught to spend hours in which they are not obliged to work in reading . . . whole progress of life

46 never heard of famous philosophers

55 I happened to carry a great many books with me

56 [classical library given to Utopians by Raphael and other visitors] Plato, Aristotle, Theoprastus [torn up by a monkey], Hesichius, Dioscorides, Plutarch, Lucian, Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles of Aldus's edition; Thucydides, Herodotus and Herodian, . . . Hippocrates, Galen . . . .

56 two things they owe to us, the manufacture of paper, and the art of printing

Looking Backward

116 (ch. 15) Mrs. Leete: "Ah, what would I give if I had not already read Berrian's novels." . . . 
Dr. Leete: "It has been an era of unexampled intellectual splendor!"

117 [publishing arrangements] 

123 [end of ch. 15] 

I sat up in my room that night reading "Penthesilia" till it grew gray in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The story-writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance from which should be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one's self or others; a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfretted by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart. The reading of "Penthesilia" was of more value than almost any amount of explanation would have been in giving me something like a general impression of the social aspect of the twentieth century. The information Dr. Leete had imparted was indeed extensive as to facts, but they had affected my mind as so many separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded but imperfectly in making cohere. Berrian put them together for me in a picture.

Instructor's note: function of representative or creative literature as ground where all meets more or less, in comparison with more specialized fields of study or creation.

Aristotle: Art an imitation of nature
Shakespeare: Hold a mirror to the world

Herland

p. 46 (ch. 4) They brought us books, in greater numbers, and I began to study them seriously.

   "Pretty punk literature," Terry burst forth one day, when we were in the privacy of our own room. "Of course one expects to begin on child-stories, but I would like something more interesting now."

   "Can't expect stirring romance and wild adventure without men, can you?" I asked. Nothing irritated Terry more than to have us assume that there were no men; but there were no signs of them in the books they gave us, or the pictures.

55 [books men carried]

Jeff, who was never without reading matter of some sort, had two little books with him, a novel and a little anthology of verse; and I had one of those pocket encyclopedias -- a fat little thing, bursting with facts. These were used in our education -- and theirs. Then as soon as we were up to it, they furnished us with plenty of their own books, and I went in for the history part -- I wanted to understand the genesis of this miracle of theirs.

And this is what happened, according to their records. . . .

102 Their child-literature was a wonderful thing. I could have spent years following delicate subtleties, the smooth simplicities with which they had bent that great art to the service of the child mind.

[Instructor's question: does "child-literature" mean literature for or about children? Probably find out from reading some more Gilman.]

100 [ch. 9]

Terry: "I tell you the higher grades of life are reached only through struggle -- combat. There's no Drama here. Look at their plays! They make me sick."

   He rather had us there. The drama of the country was -- to our taste -- rather flat. You see, they lacked the sex motive and, with it, jealousy. They had no interplay of warring nations, no aristocracy and its ambitions, no wealth and poverty opposition.

   I see I have said little about the economics of the place; it should have come before, but I'll go on about the drama now.

   They had their own kind. There was a most impressive array of pageantry, of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts and their religion broadly blended. The very babies joined in it. To see one of their great annual festivals, with the massed and marching stateliness of those great mothers, the young women brave and noble, beautiful and strong; and then the children, taking part as naturally as ours would frolic round a Christmas tree -- it was overpowering in the impression of joyous, triumphant life.

   They had begun at a period when the drama, the dance, music, religion, and education were all very close together; and instead of developing them in detached lines, they had kept the connection. . . .

Anthem

17 sin to write

27-8 Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to one of the City Halls, for the Social Meeting. . . .  [T]he Councils of the different Homes stand in a pulpit, and they speak to us of our duties and of our brother men. Then visiting Leaders mount the pulpit and they read to us the speeches which were made in the City Council that day . . . . Then we sing hymns, the Hymn of Brotherhood . . . . Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to the City Theatre for three hours of Social Recreation. There a play is shown upon the stage, with two great choruses from the Home of the Actors, which speak and answer all together, in two great voices. The plays are about toil and how good it is. Then we walk back to the Home . . . . 

36 We have stolen manuscripts. . . .

91 [In the house beyond the Forest]

We found a room with walls made of shelves, which held rows of manuscripts . . . . Never had we seen such a number of them, nor of such strange shape. . . . Tomorrow, we shall begin to read these scripts. 

98 It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house that I saw the word "I." . . .

Parable of the Sower

52 "Even some fiction might be useful"

51 adventure stories

58 "It's better to teach people than to scare them . . . .  lose their fear  . . . harder to scare them a second time"

58 "ways to entertain them and teach them at the same time"

+ Book of Earthseed

Ecotopia

158 Ecotopian novels . .    . security, almost like 19c English novels; world is decent, satisfactory, sustaining despite some difficulties . . . . At first the stories seemed puzzlingly vapid to me. I couldn’t figure out why anybody would find them interesting . . . How come they didn't have that exciting nightmare quality? Some of them even have happy endings. . . . After a while, they seem more like life--okay to spend time with, reassuring. Come to think of it, Ecotopia itself is beginning to feel a good deal more reassuring: when I needed care, I was taken care of.

scenes of reading

formal projection of form itself

reflexivity increased, pronounced--a text thinks about itself, what it is or isn't

3a. What relations develop between fictional and actual utopian communities? What has been the historical impact of utopian fictions?

Roman poet Horace on purpose of poetry / literature: "to entertain and inform"

Compared to most novels, utopian novels emphasize "inform" rather than "entertain"

Utopian novels-within-novels acknowledge "This may look boring" but ask you to stay with the reading experience and discover otherwise.

further primary research: What happens just before and after such discussions of novels or other literary arts? Any consistencies in patterns?

reminder that utopia is a fiction, however useful

"Just a story"

But a story brings ideas to greater vividness and life, showing how various ideas about politics, economics, social structures, families, gender form a complete world.

Model for civil discussion, text as neutral ground on which differing people may meet and disagree but keep talking instead of fighting

4d. How may a seminar classroom serve as a microcosm, model, or alternative for American culture?