LITR 5439 Literary &
Historical Utopias
Lecture Notes
The Dispossessed
27 March
Research Posts
Due this weekend, with usual fudge factors
return in 2 weeks
grade for both posts
next week lighter reading assignment
assignment
bring both books and Atwood handouts
Le Guin
Confession: if I like a lot, most other people won't
personal tastes differ
but evidence of genius?
quality + quantity
literary fiction (dialogue with existing works)
281 the moment was gone . . . he was in its keeping
no more walls
65 complex wholeness
Plato's Republic as dialogue, dialectic?
E.O. Wilson, sociobiology / Evolutionary Psychology
364 societal bond of fear of stranger
348 relate to small world
dialectic of machine and garden > code?
Classic as book that won't stay closed
utopia as mimesis of a whole world, overly detailed but can't finish telling everything
see connections of values and practices: pp. 324-5
Shevek modeled on Robert Oppenheimer
chapter structure: 13 chapters alternate between Anarres & Urras
complicates timeline of narrative: jump forward ch 1, jump back ch 2
timelines not equal length: Anarres story nearly all of Shevek's life; Urras story a year?
Shorter sequence on Urras more dramatic, faster moving, characters more essential?
Terrans
anarchism as Amerind voluntarism
libertarian?
342 Anarres "an experiment in nonauthoritarian communism"
women:
propertarian: ct. Woman on the Edge of Time
also Kibbutz
332 women as property
52 man wants freedom, woman wants property
science fiction, metaphor, Literature of Ideas
1c. Can utopias join science fiction, speculative fiction, and allied genres in a “literature of ideas?”
Atwood 115 sf an awkward box
Shevek with numbers, walls
p. 295 you are an idea
anarchism made flesh (allusion)
Chapter 11 [extended dialogue]
ask question before launching
essence of idea
wordplay, inversion, reversal, paradox
1 a wall, boundry, two faced [paradox]
11 lock in, lock out, same thing [paradox]
38 role was playing them [paradox, inversion]
50 Having's wrong, sharing's right [aphorism, inversion]
52 man wants freedom, woman wants property
55 can go home again, place never been
62 brotherhood begins in shared pain [aphorism
84 Odo's grant: To be whole is to be part; / true voyage is return [aphorism]
139 Odo, Social Organism: "To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws."
219 hurt another, hurt myself
285 Nobody goes hungry while another eats. [no abundance, but equality with less, socialism]
335 sunlights differ; only one darkness [aphorism]
77 pile of newspapers (no e-media)
80 telefax
machine x organism
305 sergeants give privates orders, coercive mechanism
95 ideal of complex organicism
101 The Social Organism
5a. How may a seminar classroom serve as a microcosm, model, or alternative for American culture? How does use of web instruction alter social dynamics to humanize or dehumanize?
5b. What does utopian / dystopian literature instruct concerning education?
99 children around + learning center
family
120 Rulag!
121 working 8 hours a day!
123 first year, individual contact
123 he was parental, as I am not. The work comes first.
123 proud of you . . . Unreasonable Propertarian
124 biologically mother and son > brother and sister [hierarchy > egalitarian]
hierarchy x equality
135 capitalist economy, plutocratic-oligarchic state
social cooperation, mutual aid > survive (Anarres)
millennium
231 the Chief . . . the Forerunner, before the Millennium
News from Nowhere
Dispossessed 48 immorral to do work you didn't enjoy
will people work for other reasons than profit?
ch. 9 demonstration, strike in Capitol Square, cf. Bloody Sunday 1887
[First week discussion: hard & soft sf; space travel, technology, extrasolar planets
literary and genre fiction
Anarres x-change; desert as timeless
John: British imperial system
#2 gender fluidity]
Midterm revieiw
embarrassed, made subject more interesting than I had, freshness of discovery
Anthem never meant as a utopian fiction except insofar as utopian category includes dystopias
individual x collective > Wilson
Joan on satire > utopias make us see ourselves
By learning of these utopian and dystopian societies, one learns more about our current world, and continues to attempt to grasp the extensive, maybe even inaccessible, understanding of humanity.
Robyn: Although Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which we will study in the second half of the semester, represents--to me--a place that was anything but “good” or “perfect,” that society was designed to be somebody’s idea of a utopia, just like the communist culture in Ayn Rand’s Anthem was designed to be somebody’s idea of a utopia.
Grant on Garden City > News from Nowhere, Looking Backward, Genesis (Revelation)
Jesus: Its true motive is to inspire deeper thought and to demonstrate different ways of approaching certain issues of our time.
Sisson on mundane utopian characters >
Utopian characters as background, upholding positive social conventions rather
than disrupting them