EN 4208 Utopias & Dystopias

Course Description and Objectives

This module examines the utopian impulse and its inversion through fictional constructs which extrapolate from familiar mind-sets, existing systems of social, political and ethical organisation, current technologies and eco-systems to possible worlds and alternative modes of existence that refract an acute crisis of the contemporary. The module provides an opportunity to study the imaginative impulse which revises our sense of the relation between what has been to what could have been, and of what is, to what might come to be.

This module will address the following questions: What is the appeal and function of imaginative utopias and dystopias? How do such forms of imaginative writing address the constantly changing relation of science and technology to human life as we know it, to the human individual, to human society, and to the many institutions and notions, from gender and sexuality to race, family, nation, religion and species through which the relation of the individual to the group is mediated in time and place?

Primary Texts
1. Yevgeny Zamyatin	We (1924, trans. Clarence Brown, 1993)
2. Hermann Hesse	The Glass Bead Game (1943, trans. 1960, R. & C. Winston)
3. Walter M. Miller, Jr.	A Canticle for Leibowitz 1959
4. Philip K. Dick	The Man in the High Castle (1962)
5. Ursula le Guin	The Dispossessed (1974)
6. William Gibson	Neuromancer (1984)
7. Philip Kerr	A Philosophical Investigation (1992)

Assignments & Continuous assessment

End-of-semester Examination of 2 hours (60%)

1 Class-presentation (5%)

general Class-participation (5%)

1 essay of no more than. 1,500 words (30%), which should include reference to material outside the set texts, relate it to set text(s), and integrate the discussion into issues, topics and themes dealt with in the course.

Essay due in week 11.

Lecture Schedule
Week	Date	Text/Author/Topic	Lecturer
1	31 july	Introduction 1: Utopias	RSP/SA
2	7 aug	Intro. 2: Heterotopias &c	SA
3	14 aug	Zamyatin	RSP
4	21 aug	Hesse	SA
5	28 aug	SF and Religion	RSP/SA
6	3-8 sep	1-week recess
7	11 sep	Miller	SA
8	18 sep	SF and History	SA/RSP
9	25 sep	Dick	RSP
10	2 oct	le Guin	SA
11	9 oct	Cyberculture	RSP
12	16 oct	Gibson	RSP
13	23 oct	Kerr	SA
14	30 oct	Conclusion & Revision	RSP/SA

Supplementary Reading

REFERENCE WORK

J. Clute & P. Nicholls (ed), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993)

CRITICAL WORKS

Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy 1973)

Alexandra Aldridge, The Scientific World View in Dystopia (1984)

Ursula le Guin, The Language of the Night (1979)

Ursula le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989)

Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (1984)

Brian Stableford, The Sociology of Science Fiction (1987)

Frances Bartowski, Feminist Utopias(1989)

Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993) Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (1994)

Neil Barron, Anatomy of Wonder 4 (4th edn., 1995)

Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight:Postmodern Science Fiction (1995)

Brooks Landon, Science Fiction After 1900 (1997)

JOURNALS

Science-Fiction Studies

Extrapolation

Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction

LINKS

ISF Database

SF Bibliographies

http://sflovers.rutgers.edu/bibliographies/authorlists/

http://access-co2.tamu.edu/hhall/