LITR 5431/
5439 Literary &
Historical Utopias
Lecture Notes
17 April
"Dire Cartographies" [cartography > Oscar Wilde quote:
Jenna Wood
90-1 utopia in Handmaid's Tale's dystopia?
1. past, our own present > HT 23 Luke and I, children + garden (+ Nick) Genesis: heterosexual couple / nuclear family in garden
271 hand on my belly. It's happened.
We could get you out.
I no longer want to leave, escape
51 thought we had problems. How know we were happy? [nostalgia]
2. future beyond main story [preview epilogue]
+ 3 Aunt Lydia
72 JYou are an example [utopia]
113 you are the shock troops . . . march out in advance [utopian vanguard]
graph population birthrate, past zero line of replacement
127 [sympathetic lactation] Mother, you wanted a woman's culture. [satire?]
162 women will all live in harmony together [utopia]
162 when the population level is up
Women united for a common end [utopia]
163 each performing her appointed task
a little garden for each one of you
172 Moira: create Utopia by shutting herself up in a woman-only enclave
179 I'll go underground
245 Underground Femaleroad
222 cameraderie among women
millennium
74 after the catastrophe, shot president, machine-gunned Congress
blamed on Islamic fantatics
237 Everyone's human, after all. You can't cheat Nature . . . demands variety for men . . .
typo than > that
procreational strategy
Nature's plan
He says this as if he believes it.
66 post WW2
each a latent version of other
67 oatmeal
mind / landscape (American or Romantic: cf. Quinkdom conclusion)
68 maps with monsters > urban planning
68 Land of Cockaigne: unrestricted sex, sloth, gluttony (cf. 69 Golden Age)
68 islands
69 real maps drive ustopia to unknown
underworld (caverns), hinterlands
70 other planets, past, future
70 time: maps = frozen journeys
71 maps in Earthsea and Lord of the Rings
71 Treasure Island < play map
71 ustopia 2 journeys [> News from Nowhere]
71 journeys to future
72 dream vision [> News from Nowhere]
72 Oligarchical Collectivism
72 Brave New World: "Savage" as reporter
73 potentially mappable > suspend disbelief
74 ustopia also a state of mind > 75 landscape
77 Atwood ancestors in Puritan New England [Winthrop]
77 Pre-Raphaelite . . . postcards [> News from Nowhere]
77 Lamont Library x-girl
78 non-canonical literature
78 George MacDonald
non-realistic Lewis and Tolkien
79 Romance (Metaphysical)
repressed sexuality
powerful female figures
80 great-grannies of Wonder Woman
Avatar as fairy painting
81 19c utopias, radical social thinkers [> News from Nowhere]
82 cf. Before and After makeovers
1800s hundreds of actual utopias
83 Hawthorne and Scarlet Letter : Putian utopia + prison and graveyard
83 [millennium] Great War > utopian social enginnering on large scale
84 Fordlandia
grab for heaven, produce hell
84-5 mid-20c > dark
85 ustopia, utopia
85 people always better looking, esp. women [> News from Nowhere]
85 yin / yang
each within other [Handmaid's Tale]
86 provision for renegades: prison, enslavement, exile, exclusion, execution
3 novel-length ustopias of my own
Handmaid's Tale Berlin, claustrophobic
87 totalitarian, utopian
Alabama
how thin ice is for "liberated" Western women?
totalitarian USA, what form?
civil liberties > safety
control reproduction
who owns the kids?
88 historical precedents
Old Dutch Cleanser [image at bottom]
90 1984 lost to Brave New World (fall of Berlin Wall, triumph of capitalism)
90 enemy states mirror each other ["base" and "al-Qaeda"]
90-1 utopia in Handmaid's Tale's dystopia?
1. past, our own present
2. future beyond main story
91 utopian societies > thesis topics [genre fiction for eggheads]
91 Oryx & Crake technocracy and anarchy
+ designer people
92 designer people can't read; x-romantic rejection
lab-grown meat
sibling book, Year of the Flood < God's Gardeners
same world, different perspective, outside enclaves
93 utopia within dystopia: God's Gardeners
x-sequels, prequels
94 climate change
species wide rescue effort? Where has utopian thinking gone?
94-5 Crakers designed to be well-behaved [E. O. Wilson]
95 make thinks better but not perfect (cf. Constitution)
219 [public spectacle, ceremony] [utopia]
marriages encouraged, by mothers
220 women's Prayvaganzas for group weddings; men's for military victories
276 touch rope as unity, complicity
Offred's name
84 [memory] another name
97 to be held and told my name . . . I repeat my former name
270 talk too much, tell him my real name
293 black van, Nick, it's Mayday, calls me by my name
African American utopias, dystopias
Interesting Narrative of the Life of . . . Olaudah Equiano, The African
Other African American text possibilities, esp. if course is taught in long semester
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)--esp. for "parallel world" or "world within a world" aspects; cf. grandmother baking crackers in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Toni Morrison, Paradise (1997)
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976)
Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist (1999)
Other American Indian text possibilities? Mexican American?
Black Elk Speaks (1932) esp. chapters on "Ghost Dance" millennial movement
Leslie
Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (1991)
Practical issues:
Try to avoid making students read large amounts for just a few pages of relevance
Some conservative students may see such moves as "canon expansion by affirmative action."
Final test: Is the text working for the class?
Morrison's Paradise
Toni Morrison (b. 1931), Paradise (1998)
Title page and list of books--who's familiar with what?
What is Morrison's reputation? Nationally and in schools?
1993 Nobel Prize for Literature--highest international award
First African American and American woman author to win
Experience reading, teaching?
Toni Morrison probably among handful of greatest American authors (such decisions take time)
Faulkner, Whitman, James plus or minus Melville, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill
How establish greatness?
Quality: genius, courage, brilliance, daring, learning—James: “Be one of the people on whom nothing is wasted.”
Development of tradition: great writers inherit and renew the work of previous great writers--e.g. Morrison did a master’s thesis on Faulkner; her style resembles and goes beyond Faulkner's
Influence on later writers, influenced by previous writers: great writers read their important predecessors, and they push to the next level beyond what their predecessors achieved—process repeats in influence on later writers (for Morrison, it’s too early to judge influence on other writers)
Quantity of quality: a number of writers have written a few great works, but comparative thinness of great works affects reputation: Hemingway, Twain, Hawthorne, Fitzgerald all wrote great works, but either didn’t write as much or repeated themselves instead of advancing
Another standard of greatness in fiction:
number & power of distinct characters
in lesser writers, the characters seem alike, similarly motivated, similar profiles and imaginations, fewer in number
Great writers almost god-like in creation of human characters--compare great musicians with creation of melodies (Bach, Mozart)
Shakespeare is the gold standard; next are Dickens and Faulkner--also Flannery O'Connor
Morrison: characters seem always to have been there, self-existent—like they were waiting in some reality to meet you
Power of invention
Not an easy read, though--very challenging--
Reader learns, discovers + experiences delight in putting parts together--participates in creative process (Aristotle: "To learn gives the liveliest pleasure")
What I discover in Morrison (esp. in Song of Solomon and Paradise):
Self-existent African American world
surprisingly whole unto itself, not defined strictly by reference to white world--white world is often kept at a distance or unremarked (parallel world)
Again a quality of great writers: to create a whole world, a microcosm or mirror: cf. Dickens's London, Dickens for Christmas
Backstory for Paradise:
Possible applications to utopian studies:
Compare journey from Haven to Ruby to Moses and chosen people on Exodus to Promised Land
(Recall that Dr. King made similar comparisons b/w himself and Moses)
compare Oven to Arc of the Covenant
"The Convent" as feminine / feminist counterpart to patriarchal town of Haven / Ruby (founded by Big Papa and Big Daddy)
"Convent"--compare to monastery that may have modeled More's Utopia, but for women rather than men
PBS interview of Toni Morrison
10 April
certainty of genre > ambiguities, intertextuality (esp. in literary fiction)
1. How identify Handmaid's Tale as a dystopia (cf. Anthem) not only in content but gains in readability, characterization, narrative action?
Handmaid as dystopian fiction
individual, underground
20 false news . . . must mean something
first barrier, red hexagon = stop
lanterns, floodlights, machine guns, pillboxes
Green uniforms of the Guardians of the Faith
21 never allowed solitude
53 a grapevine, an underground of sorts
72 Janine: self-criticism sessions; cf. Dispossessed, Tirin
83 Resettlement of the Children of Ham
87 Bible locked up, read to but we cannot read
219 Money was the only measure of worth. [utopia / dystopia]
220 Those years an anomaly . . . return to Nature's norm
2. Compare Handmaid's Tale as a feminist dystopia with Herland as feminist utopia. Potential feminist issues: the body dismembered; masculine gaze. (Does Atwood's sensory emphasis on smell counter the masculine gaze?)
Susan Bordo, mind-body duality identifies woman with body > property
38 date rape . . . borrowing $5
park with mother . . . women burning books, magazines [unforeseen consequences of limiting expression?]
39 still on fire, parts of women's bodies, turning to black ash
ch 16 94 What he is fucking is the lower part of my body
ch 17 96 only the insides of our bodies important
114 what God must look like: an egg
127 [sympathetic lactation] Mother, you wanted a woman's culture. [satire?]
136 two-legged womb
153 something subversive about this garden of Serena's; a sense of buried things bursting upwards
[aphorism] Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Ch. 26 160 pretend not to be present, in the flesh
161 like being on an operating table
no longer a thing . . . it complicates [dehumanization]
taken something from Serena Joy
Atwood as poet
47 hands empty, full
yeast, nostalgic, smell, kitchens, mothers [free association, poetry]
ch 12 62 bath a requirement, also a luxury
95 smells
114 [free association] [words] None of these facts has any connection with the others . . . litanies I use to compose myself
ch 21 123 smell of our own, flesh, organic . . . smell of matrix
153 Rendezvous, terraces, sibilants run up my spine
Back to News from NowhereB
"Dire Cartographies"
71 ustopia 2 journeys [> News from Nowhere]
72 dream vision [> News from Nowhere]
77 Pre-Raphaelite . . . postcards [> News from Nowhere]
utopias as genre fiction for eggheads and do-gooders
cf. film noir, or westerns or rom-coms: minor variations tweak familiar, update, revive
more than one text open all the time x love of one autonomous book that says everything; cf. dialogue, dialectic; "make the texts talk to each other"
3 April
Thanks for participation. Mostly taught in summer before, so happened so fast that students didn't know what hit them, but this longer semester re-sensitizes me to the strangeness of our topic for most of us, so thanks for playing along in a good spirit and doing what you can with the subject.
Past students seem to have enjoyed the seminar, mostly with a wide-eyed "who knew?" surprise at how much there was to the subject, or to the fact that some utopian or intentional communities are happening even now.
literature of ideas
alternative to cynicism, pessimism, limits of common sense > resilience (can't avoid problems, have to bounce back)
facts are real, but . . . .
no one's finally, completely right or wrong or history would end > dialogue, dialectic
undiscovered possibilities
Assignments
Lauren
willing to reprise the
presentation with new scenes for a second week but also that others are welcome
to show a scene or two.
farewell notes: my gen, idea of utopia self-sustaining, but if we can stop thinking utopian, maybe also stop dystopian?
implication of child care in utopias: children will be good if in nature; human nature good
Le Guin
importance of reading what you resist
outsiders see others' worlds as utopias, or unattainable options
Angie & gang: Shevek and friends criticize Anarres freely while remaining committed to collective principles (structure + freedom in Ecotopia?)
anthropology; cf. historical notes end of Handmaid's Tale
Kibbutzim
rise & fall with political support
Israel labor governments through 1960s > 1977 Likud
incest taboo
Dispossessed
other issues?
348 You Odonians chose a desert; we Terrans made a desert
9 billion > 1/2 billion
plastics don't adapt
we failed as a social species
charity of the Hainish . . . altruits . . . moved by a guilt
total centralization, control, rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into labor force
women:
propertarian: ct. Woman on the Edge of Time
also Kibbutz
52 man wants freedom, woman wants property
73
180 Takver: I need the bond [+ keeps child]
245 Odo's femininity x-real sexual freedom
331 pregnant women no ethics; biological, not social
332 women as property
[x-women as Rambo > how does woman as hero change the idea of a hero?]
News from Nowhere and Woman on Edge of Time: giving up property frees women as property, but what about children?
