**1st Eight Weeks**

Focus on the evolution of literary utopias from the sixteenth century
to the present.  Topics will include the relationship between Western
utopian thought and its mythical, religious, and philosophical
sources; and the impact of  scientific discourse and New World
discoveries on utopian narratives.

Our reading of the earliest utopian fiction, Thomas More's Utopia,
together with Tomaso Campanella's City of the Sun and Francis Bacon's
New Atlantis, will help us to establish the structural and thematic
paradigms that shaped the search for an ideal society. Comparing
genre-crossing texts throughout the centuries, our goal will be to
foreground such significant developments in the utopian tradition as
the shift from space to time, which marks the utopian travel narrative
from the eighteenth century on.

Along with the geographical discovery of a possible world, utopia
often means the discovery of an anticipated history.  That variation
on the utopian paradigm will be exemplified by Louis-Sebastien
Mercier's The Year 2440. In the twentieth century, utopian dream tends
to become dystopian nightmare, as seen in Aldous Huxley's Brave New
World and postmodern fiction, including Jose Saramago's The Stone Raft
and  Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before.