Amy Sasser

Looking Back to Moving Forward

          In an effort to induce deeper levels of understanding of “utopia” and its myriad of offshoots (dystopia, ecotopias, communes, intentional communities, etc.), I looked back and reviewed some of the work of the most recent seminar, conducted in 2011.  I selected three midterm assignments to work from, and I found quite a bit of guidance.  I digested some best practices, took warning from some which didn’t work so well, and increased my own comprehension of this literary genre through this small bit of research.

          In searching for ideas and approaches that seemed to work well for previous students, I found at least one stellar example in each essay.  In “The Attraction of Perfection,” Chrissie Johnston begins with a short, but insightful and interesting hook that is well-written and easy to understand.  This draws her reader in and invites them to come along on the journey she describes in the remainder of her essay.  She speaks of the difficulty in defining utopia from a literary perspective because “Getting a group of people to totally agree on something is not easy, and when someone does not agree, . . . [when] they do not believe a perfect society is possible, or if it is not their idea of perfection, it is not a utopia and they stop reading.”  She then turns the tables and speaks to man’s insatiable curiosity, thus extending her definition of “utopia” and tying into Objective 1a for the course.  Similarly, Omar Syed, in his essay “Utopias are Scarier than Dystopias,” approached the assignment as a journey.  His ideas were both sound and well-supported, and he argued that the utopian novels espouse a sort of one-sided soliloquy, while dystopian novels create a dialog within the conflict of opposing world views.  My third choice to review was Nicole Wheatley’s “The Hypocritical World of Utopias.”  As with both my previous choices, what drew my interest was the title:  clear and easy to understand with the promise of something interesting to follow.  One sentence from Wheatley’s essay which immediately grabbed my attention was the concise comparison, “Utopias are the dreams we look for.  Dystopias are the nightmares we try to escape. . . .”  She stuck well to her promised examination of hypocrisy, pointing out that, “underneath the surface, utopias are the ultimate tyranny, one man’s or woman’s way of imaging [sic] society as it should be, with no other options or alternatives.”  Each of these essays, however, also had something that didn’t work out as well, or that became a definite instruction of what not to do.

          Taking a secondary stroll through the journeys with these scholars, I found some practices that I will attempt to avoid.  For example, about halfway through Johnston’s essay, the tables turn a bit from journey of discovery to more of a planned path of attack.  While knowing this intended application of her new knowledge is gratifying to the reader, the turn seemed a bit abrupt and became much more personal in scope.  Additionally, she names some notable figures, but misspells one of their names, and her typos and grammatical errors seem to increase in frequency (though, overall, they remain minimal) near the end of her essay.  While reviewing Syed’s work, I found that his near run-on sentences and rambling lists of authors or titles tend to distract from his mission and leave the reader stranded in a sea of words with no visible shoreline to save them.  The work made me dig for meaning hidden among the prose, often having to read and re-read sentences to follow them.  The method lacked cohesion and coherence.  For example, in illustrating the point regarding soliloquy versus dialog, he shoves the entire explanation into one sentence spanning four lines and follows it with a long-winded example from The Giver, before quoting an earlier student, and returning again to his Giver evidence.  However, he doesn’t stop there, as he then adds several other examples along with another quote which does not stem from course texts or previous student work.  This point could have been well made with a bit of reorganization of elements and some meticulous editing.  Switching gears to Wheatley’s work, despite the aforementioned gems of seeming wisdom, I find that her entire paper becomes suspect the moment she quotes Wikipedia as a source and only sporadically uses quotation marks to indicate which words are her own versus someone else’s throughout the paper.  Combined with the assumed universal definition of Heaven (not everyone would agree that her assertions are their idea of Heaven), the improper punctuation and grammar, and switching between tenses or first, second and third person, this piece becomes a chore to read.  One sentence, even taken in context, quite literally gives me a headache:
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These feeling are the direct and desired results of leaders, a way for the leaders to minimize conflict and maximize quality and harmony among the Utopians. I play on society by More using satire as the genre helping the give the novel itself a plot. The utopian leaders “do [ing] everything they can to bring these metals into contempt” (87) a hypocritical way of forcing citizens of the society to believe something in order to bring them excess, and just reinstating a utopian never survives without some form of greed. Just proving utopian is a ruse, a joke, a hypocritical place where in the end human nature always wins and evil prevails [emphasis mine].

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This example, therefore, becomes a primer in how not to construct a midterm response.  Once again, some judicious editing and perhaps restructuring could have greatly improved the overall quality of the piece.

          Finally, I reviewed each work to see what new insights it inspired in me or how it may have expanded knowledge gained within the seminar or the readings.  As a writing teacher, I found that some of Johnston’s insights fit well within my own experiences interacting with students.  She says, “Connecting characters to readers, readers to characters, and therefore to social issues is what literature is all about.”  That is a well-said concept that I will continue to consider both in my own writing and in my instruction in the practice.  Moving back into Syed’s essay, I am again struck with his idea that utopia is one-sided and dystopia is in itself a dialog.  I believe this idea could be further expanded with more time and research, as well as used to help explain why today’s educational system tends to focus on dystopian works exclusively.  Finally, in trying to find what take-aways I could amongst Wheatley’s words, I focused on her discussion of duality, when she says (or perhaps quotes), “the binary structure of language which produces an abundant network of paired terms whose meanings are one another’s opposites – masculine/feminine, public/private, good/evil – and so on. What is masculine is not feminine, what is public cannot be private.”  It is intriguing to consider what that means when faced with a one-gender society like that found in Herland.

          This process of reviewing and reporting on previous students’ work has been quite enlightening as I face my own midterm.  I have found both good and bad in each of the examples I studied, and I have expanded my own understanding of the topics paramount in the course objectives.  I found this assignment, rather than being “another paper” or another writing chore, has been a useful endeavor which I will consider in other classes and other work moving forward.