(Utopian Practices: Reformers and Utopians in Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture)

The influence of the trope of the United States as an experiment, a new world offering an escape from the repressive relations of the old, is evident in a history littered with the remains of utopian fictions, perfectionist schemes and communitarian adventures. This seminar will focus on how the utopian impulse has manifested itself in American literature and culture, with our historical investigations informing our attention to developments in the last half of the twentieth-century. A central theme will be how contemporary writers, paraphrasing Kim Stanley Robinson, recapture a utopian tradition often dismissed as dead or irrelevant, and use it to intervene in contemporary political discourses around race, gender, capitalism, and the environment. The course will cover topics such as the foundation of contemporary utopianism in the work of Bellamy and Wells, the effect of utopian literature on politics and aesthetics, and the persistent resurgence of political hope generated by new sciences and expressed in the creation of technological utopias, and the connections between literary utopias and developments in architecture and environmental science. A substantial secondary literature of historical and critical work will provide context and perspective for our reading, research and discussion during the seminar. Writers such as Callenbach, Delany, Piercy, and Le Guin will provide the fuel for our work.