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LITR 5431 Literary & Historical Utopias |
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Angela Pennington
9 May 2019
Essay 1: The Dispossessed, The Handmaid's Tale, & Oryx and Crake as Utopian or Literary Fiction—
Literary Utopias: Why Reading
Atwood and Le Guin Isn’t Always Easy
The debate as to whether a work is “literary” or “genre
fiction” often dominates university writer’s workshops. To have one’s work be
called “genre fiction” is to be called cheap, unoriginal, unenlightening. To be
literary, then, is to be rich, new, and thought-provoking. In our study of
utopian literature, Course Objective 1.
Utopian Genre contains several sub-objectives which participate in this
discourse of literary versus genre fiction: 1b. “What genres join with or branch
from utopia?”, 1c. “Can utopias join science fiction, speculative fiction, and
allied genres in a ‘literature of ideas?’”, and 1e. “Utopian aesthetics: How
does Utopian Fiction rebalance literature's classical purpose to entertain and
educate?” Something of note is that these objectives all call into question this
divide between genre and literary fiction. Ursala K. Le Guin’s
The Dispossessed alongside Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale and
Oryx and Crake conform to many genre
fiction conventions of utopian, dystopian, and science fiction literature;
however, through complex characterization and setting, these novels call
readers’ assumptions and expectations into question instead of reinforcing
commonly held values, situating the works within the sphere of literary fiction.
Genre fiction leans into literature as entertainment,
whereas literary fiction is typically more concerned with the reader’s
instruction. This instruction, however, must be more than an exercise in moral
spoon-feeding and socially enlightened back-patting. The American reader needs
not spend more than a few moments with Aunt Lydia’s words regarding “freedom to
and freedom from” (Atwood 24) before rejecting them as propaganda; Americans
have been trained to desire freedom to:
freedom to choose and practice our religion, freedom to speak in a public forum,
freedom to petition the Federal Government of the United States; these liberties
are all found in the first amendment of the United States Constitution. This
does not, however, dismiss freedom from,
otherwise known as protections. Freedom
from is familiar to the American imagination in the context of freedom from
a tyrannical ruler—the Declaration of Independence being another sacred document
to the American public school. The antagonistic Aunt Lydia wholly endorses
freedom from—protection—over
freedom to—liberty. Atwood calls the
reader to understand that protection is not the enemy, indoctrination of
binaries that suppress critical thinking is.
The Dispossessed
shares this
preoccupation with dispelling the binaries of liberty and protection within
government. “Freedom is never very safe,” says Le Guin’s protagonist Shevek on
the topic of Annaresti society (384). The anarchist society of Annares uses the
Divilab organization to coordinate work efforts in a way that is supposed to be
fulfilling and beneficial to all Annarestis. The character Bedap finds fault
with Divilab’s determination of certain fields not “useful”—fields such as art,
Bedap argues, are labeled “mere decoration” (Le Guin 176). This labeling of
aesthetic endeavors as without use is problematic to Bedap not only because of
its hierarchical approach to divisions of labor, but because “the freedom of
invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal” has been
sacrificed in order to ensure the base needs of the Annaresti people are being
met (Le Guin 176). Though Annares is an anarchist society, social pressure to
forego some individual pursuits in order to save the public from starvation is
common. Seemingly, Le Guin is insinuating that these interactions between
liberty and protection are present even without government. Shevek, the
protagonist of The Dispossessed,
reflects on Urras, the hypercapitalist foil to Annares: “They all looked, to
him, anxious. He had often seen that anxiety before in the faces of Urrasti, and
wondered about it. Was it because, no matter how much money they had, they
always had to worry about making more, lest they die poor?” (Le Guin 208). Here,
Shevek is pondering the social implications of
freedom to and
freedom from—Urrasti society rests on
freedom to pursuits of material wealth. Wealth is relative, however, and so one
Urrasti’s gain is another’s loss. Neither the hard-earned, self-sacrificial life
of the Annaresti and the divided, competitive life of the Urrasti seem to align
completely with American culture. It is left to the reader, then, to understand
which parts of each society reflect the dystopian aspects of American society.
The Handmaid’s Tale and
The Dispossessed thereby prove to be
literary in their refusal to submit to a straightforward instruction on the
“correct” way of life; they encourage the reader to do the work in examining
their own society by first identifying those things that are problematic with
the societies of Gilead, Annares, and Urras.
It isn’t simply the warring spheres of liberty and
protection that are being thrown into question by Atwood.
The Handmaid’s Tale, at a cursory
glance, may appear as a black-and-white critique on patriarchal Western culture.
Men such as the Commander seem to have all the power, whereas women such as
Offred are exploited for male gain. Aunt Lydia’s totalitarian extremism in hand
with her abuse of the women in the Red Center reinforces the tensions produced
by American bipartisanship as necessary instruments—checks and balances against
destructive zealotry. Still, in this simplification, there has been a
contradiction. Aunt Lydia is the mouthpiece of patriarchal doctrine, yet she is
also a woman; therefore she lies in the space of both oppressor and oppressed.
On the subject of Aunts, in the “Historical Notes” epilogue to
The Handmaid’s Tale, the fictional
Professor Maryann Crescent Moon states that “when power is scarce, a little of
it is tempting” (Atwood 318). This statement is significant in that it echoes
the sentiments of Offred’s mother that were shared earlier in the novel: “truly
amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations”
(Atwood 281). Offred recalls her mother’s words at a time of personal weakness.
She has found a little power in her secret relationship with Nick, and she
believes that is all she needs to get by. In genre fiction this would be a
moment ripe for a classic reversal: after recalling her mother’s words, Offred
should feel ashamed and resume her rebellious, revolutionary ways. She
continues, however, “Ofglen is giving up on me … I do not feel regret about
this. I feel relief” (Atwood 281). Offred has been tempted, just as the aunts,
and she has found compensation for the conditions that she lives in. How, then,
is she any different from Aunt Lydia? Literary fiction is mimetic of the
Socratic method of teaching in that it creates questions that the reader must
answer for themselves. This can be connected to Roland Barthes’ idea of
“readerly” and “writerly” texts: Barthes writes that “the goal of literary work
… is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4).
The reader, then, plays an active role in “writing” Atwood’s text, producing
meaning through the questioning of assumptions they were socialized to hold,
instead of purely consuming those things about the text which reinforce cultural
values. These novels open themselves up to this kind of writerly approach on
behalf of the reader, and that is what makes them literary fiction.
The writerly approach to literary texts stands in
opposition to escapism. Escapist fiction, as explained in the course page on
escapism, is literature that “instead of confronting and engaging with social,
psychological, or material problems, seeks to escape them by identifying with
uncomplicated, virtuous, and attractive characters who enjoy swashbuckling
adventures in exotic settings” (White). The post-apocolyptic setting of Atwood’s
novel Oryx and Crake seems ideal for
escapist exploitation, but then there is Snowman. In the first chapter of
Oryx and Crake, Snowman scares away
the Children of Crake; the children are “still not sure whether to be afraid of
him, or how afraid. He hasn’t been known to harm a child, but his nature is not
fully understood. There’s no telling what he might do” (Atwood 9). Here,
the protagonist Snowman is established to be everything that an escapist
hero is not. First and foremost, Atwood’s protagonist is complicated. The
centers around his social, psychological, and material problems. The reader,
however, like the Children of Crake, does not fully understand his nature. Le
Guin provides us with a similarly complex protagonist in the form of Shevek.
After hearing Bedap’s criticism of Divlab and the collapsing of the Odonian
ideals, Shevek considers that:
“he
was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such
by virtue of his upbringing and
education as an Odonian and an Annaresti. He could not rebel against his
society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent
one, an ongoing process.” (Le Guin 176)
The problems being faced within the exotic locale of
Annares are not simply Annaresti problems, but
human problems. Shevek is aware that
many of his own virtues are owed to his social indoctrination, yet he often
feels at odds with his society. Shevek finds no more of a comfortable home on
Urras, yet, instead of choosing to leave society altogether, Shevek has chosen
to act to improve Annaresti society. Though both Le Guin’s
Dispossessed and Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake provide us with a
seemingly exotic locale, the reader cannot escape from the sociopolitical
commentary taking place in these texts, solidifying their status as literary.
While Le Guin
and Atwood dip their toes into the genre of utopian literature, their works are
literary first and foremost. Both authors work to create complex environments
and characters that entice the reader to question their own values, society, and
assumptions about life. While our “readerly” impulse to simply accept
instruction without questioning may be more prevalent in texts such as Thomas
More’s Utopia, it has been said that
the value of utopian literature—literature that centers around an ideal
society—is that it allows for the reader to reflect upon those things in their
society that are not ideal. Texts such as
The Handmaid’s Tale, The Dispossessed, and
Oryx and Crake take this a step
further by calling into question the notion of utopia. The reader must draw the
lines between utopia and dystopia in these works and, requiring that work from
the reader is what makes these texts literary.
Essay 2: Personal/Professional Interest—
Reaching Utopia in a
Forty-Five-Minute Class Period
As a student, teacher, and tutor of reading and writing I
am constantly thinking of ways that the English classroom can be reformed or
improved. Charter schools, private schools, and home school co-ops seem to
have risen from the ashes of the dystopian K-12 public school system so as to
provide education that more aligns with utopian ideals of community, pursuit of
truth and goodness, and harmonic relationship between school and life for
teachers and students alike. These solutions come with their own problems,
however, and it would appear that Ronald Barnett’s concept of a “feasible
utopia”, as referenced in my second research post, is important now more than
ever. We can use Objective 5b. “What does utopian / dystopian literature
instruct concerning education?” as one of our guiding lights in approaching the
topic of how to create the utopian K-12 English classroom, however, it is
important to look at lessons from both literary and historical utopias in order
to form a praxis—synthesis of theory and practice—that can be applied by
students, teachers, and administrators.
First, what is the role of the student in the utopian
classroom? A student must take an active role in the citizenship that Stoller
claims the public education system is preparing them for. The citizens of
Callenbach’s Ecotopia delight in the
practice of cooperative criticism; they freely instruct and learn from one
another to pursue the betterment of the society as a whole. So must students
participate in cooperative criticism in the classroom, questioning the practices
of classmates, instructors, and administrators alike. If this sounds like a
classroom management nightmare, it may be because of how we approach authority
in the classroom. Why, for example, can students understand the virtues of
cooperative criticism in the context of essay peer review assignments, but not
when speaking with authorities or amongst themselves? Perhaps this is because of
the boundaries created by the rubric: students not only understand their role as
peer reviewers and its limitations, but they understand its values and
practices.
This leads into the role of teachers, then, in creating a
classroom environment with clear boundaries that are conducive to learning
objectives so that students may operate effectively and expressively within the
English classroom. The reason why a rule is in place should never be a mystery
in the classroom. A practice that is becoming more common in the K-12 classroom
is constructing the classroom rules collaboratively with students. A teacher may
have a handful of rules in mind that they scaffold students toward suggesting
but should remain open to students’ unique rule suggestions. Dedicating the
first day of class to this discussion of rules will give students ownership over
their management: they will acknowledge that the teacher as an authority is
enforcing rules not simply for the sake of totalitarian rule such as the systems
of indoctrination in Ayn Rand’s Anthem,
but rather a teacher maintains rule for the purpose of the common good of
students.
I have said a word on cooperative criticism and how it
should be implemented in the classroom, however, I do feel that it deserves
further elaboration. Socratic seminars aside, constant questioning and answering
will derail even the best lesson plans. The best method, then, seems to be to
plan for cooperative criticism. In the common public school model of a five-day,
forty-five-minute English class, ranging from Monday through Friday, a fifteen
to thirty minute time block at the end of class on Fridays wherein students can
discuss grievances and teachers and students alike can brainstorm solutions
seems achievable. Why fifteen to thirty minutes? I would suggest implementing
this practice as early as the third grade and continuing it through high school.
As students gain understanding of the world around them, so they should gain
agency within their education. The English classroom may also be the ideal space
for cooperative criticism in the form of argumentative essay writing. We have
seen in our utopian texts—More’s Utopia,
Gilman’s Herland, Callenbach’s
Ecotopia, and Le Guin’s
Dispossessed—that questioning one’s
assumptions is necessary to avoid the rigid, socially and philosophically
stagnant dystopias of Anthem, The
Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake.
Just as students must interrogate their beliefs, so should teachers. Commonly
held beliefs about how classrooms best operate may, and perhaps should, be
called into question, and teachers must be open to change.
How can administrators best support teachers and students
in this endeavor of creating the utopian classroom? The primary challenge that
administrators face when trying to cultivate utopian environments within the
school are budgetary concerns. Teacher compensation, classroom sizes, and
allocated resources for instruction are all understood to be priorities that
there never seems to be enough money for.
What’s an administrator to do, then? It was suggested in
my research post that departments of the university work together as opposed to
operating as isolated units. Administrators of K-12 schools often push teachers
to “collaborate, collaborate, collaborate!”, yet, they do not provide tools or
spaces for teachers to do so. Consider the example of the Hull House
neighborhood, wherein a community of immigrants with various ethnic identities
were given the tools to work together and support one another. Administrators
have a unique position in that their connection to the public school system’s
department of curriculum and instruction allows for a broader understanding of
how individual classrooms contribute toward overall learning goals.
Administrators should actively participate in pairing teachers whose learning
objectives align in such a way that their classrooms can inform each other. For
example, in the setting of an American high school, the collaboration of
American government, American history, and American literature classrooms would
perhaps produce a broader understanding of and discourse on American culture
than treating these subjects as isolated spheres would. We need to get away from
thinking that working together with an English teacher simply means partnering
with their red pen for spelling and grammatical errors on writing assignments.
A feasible utopian classroom may be hard-earned, but its
rewards will be well worth reaping. Students, teachers, and administrators need
to take a lesson from literary and historical utopias and work together to make
the K-12 English classroom a feasible utopia, so that they may all more fully
enjoy the freedoms that education truly has to offer.
Essay 3: Web Highlights—
Where is Utopia in Education?
In this review of web highlights,
I focused my efforts on researching what aspects of modern education can be
considered utopian. Instead of buying into the idea that utopian ideals cannot
exist within the real world, where did previous students find utopian practices?
I examined three posts: Munira Omari’s “Personal Interests in Experimental
Communities”, Katie Raney’s “Literacy as a Communal Experience and a Way to Cope
in the Dystopian Antebellum
One ideal that can be found in
both literary and historical utopias is communalism. Bollich writes that in an
online classroom’s synchronous chatroom, “Disabled students now have access to
quality instructors and can feel more confident in their discussions when
participating in an equalizing community of online learners.” Bollich thereby
proposes that the anonymity and accessibility of the online environment has an
equalizing effect on students, preventing social hierarchies that may lead to
conflict. Similarly, in researching African-American slaves’ literacy
narratives, Raney discovers that “literacy is very much a group experience”
(Raney). The sharing of perspectives, experiences, and ideas through the
practices of reading and writing can be liberating to both author and reader.
This can be seen throughout utopian and dystopian literature: in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman’s Herland, the
developing literacies of the tutors and tutees inspires a deeper relationship
and understanding of each other’s cultures. In Ursala K. Le Guin’s
The Dispossessed, the Pravic language
is believed to reflect communal Odonian values such as how the absence of
possessive pronouns indicates that the Annaresti society does not believe in
private property. It becomes clear, then, that establishing a community that
allows for free and open discourse, based on understanding and equal sharing of
information is foundational to the utopian classroom.
Does this
mean that utopian classrooms do not encourage individualistic thought? Omari
warns that often “in utopian societies, a person is not given the chance to
follow any ambition they choose,” resulting in the society’s progression into
dystopia. Ultimately, “a utopian society must encourage individuality” (Omari).
This charge to promote equality whilst encouraging individuality at first seems
dizzying. Bollich claims that “virtual schools do not promote a “we” over “I” …
but instead allow the student the opportunity to be an individual, a group
learner and an active participant in the learning experience.” It seems that
Bollich is presenting the classroom as a forum: a place where students can share
their differing ideas on equal footing. Just as the anarchist society of
Annaresti in The Dispossessed
encourages simultaneous individualism and communalism, so must the utopian
classroom.
Now, where
are the snags? Bollich claims that “the advent of e-mail has allowed” for the
emergence of the utopian teacher, who “would be able to dedicate her time to
each and every student and be available at all hours of the day to answer
questions and provide specific tutelage to individual student needs.” This
statement must be unpacked as thus: “utopian teacher” here must mean both “no
teacher” and “good teacher”, because there is no human teacher that could
dedicate all hours of the day to answering questions and catering to students’
needs. As we recall teachers are people too, we must think of how to make email
work in a way that is utopic for teachers and students alike. Now, what about
that “specific tutelage”? The answer here is the same as usual; smaller class
sizes are needed for teachers to cater best to individual student needs. I have
heard some unique approaches to classroom design in online writing courses,
however, wherein the instructor gave students the option of a
“choose-your-own-adventure” style of curriculum, i.e. students can select a
curriculum path that most suits their educational goals upon entering the class.
This does require heavy critical thinking on the student’s part, however, and
would need a lot of priming and scaffolding for K-12 students.
Now for
problems less technical, more philosophical: do we need a millennium event
before public education can achieve utopia? Omari writes of the Oneidas that the
only reason Alfred Noyes “started this community is that he was upset because
his wife had left him to be with another man.” Similarly, Herland’s femine
utopia began because “there existed no men in their island as a result of war”
(Omari). It seems that Omari is insinuating that true good can only come from
deep suffering. Returning to Raney’s study of African-American slave narratives,
“Though literacy can be a painful, alienating experience … at its heart, it
empowered the slaves to connect with and expose the white world around for the
first time.” If we take Raney’s words into consideration—and I think we
should—there will always be some suffering in education, but with this shared
suffering comes a community based on empathy and connections between otherwise
isolated populations.
We are not like the Herlanders; we will never know a
world without pain or competition, and that is okay. Objective 5d proposes the
question: “Can new sections of courses build on previous sections'
accomplishments?” Progress comes from working on what has been built before us.
For this reason, education does not need a complete overhaul, simply a
reprioritizing of ideals currently expressed within the classroom. From reading
these research posts, it has become apparent to me that we have the building
blocks of a utopian classroom in front of us, we simply need to use them.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret.
The Handmaid's Tale. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1986.
Atwood, Margaret.
Oryx and Crake. Anchor Books, 2004.
Barnett, Ronald. “The Coming of the Ecological
University.” Oxford Review of Education,
vol. 37, no.
Barthes, Roland.
S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller, Macmillan, 1974.
Bollich, Julie. “Virtual Schools, Equity for All.”
LITR 5439 Utopias UHCL 2009 Research
Posting,
Dionne, E. J. "Why Americans Hate Politics: A Reprise."
The Brookings Review, vol. 18, no. 1,
2000,
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Dispossessed. 1974. Harper Voyager, 2011.
Omari,
Munira. “Personal Interests in Experimental Communities.”
LITR 5439 Literary &
Historical Utopias UHCL 2013 Final Exam Submission,
2013, coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/
Whitec/LITR/5439utopia/models/finals/f2013/f13E2Omari.htm.
Pennington, Angela. “Part II: Utopias in Practice and How to Avoid a Dystopian
Society.” Literary
& Historical Utopias UHCL 2019 Midterm Submission,
2019, coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/
Whitec/LITR/5439utopia/models/midterms/mt19/mt19Pennington.htm
Pennington, Angela. “The Utopian University.”
Literary & Historical Utopias UHCL 2019
Model
Assignments,
2019,
coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5439utopia/models/resposts/rp19/19rp2/rp2Pennington.htm
Raney, Katie. “Literacy as a Communal Experience and a
Way to Cope in the Dystopian Antebellum
Stoller, Aaron. "The Flipped Curriculum: Dewey’s Pragmatic University."
Studies in Philosophy and
White,
Craig. “ESCAPISM! (&Escapist Fiction).”
Terms & Themes for Craig White's Literature Courses at
