Lit and Culture: Utopian and Dystopian Visions

Catalog description

This offering of ENG 310 gives students the opportunity to discover how utopian and dystopian writings that look optimistically or pessimistically to the future do so by looking back to critique their precursors. Thus, in effect, utopian and dystopian tales have been engaging in something like a 2500-year-old debate between the present and the past over what should be our vision of a future ideal society, over what nightmarish forms of society we most want to guard ourselves against, and equally, over what dangers might attend our indulging in such imaginings, or of neglecting to do so. In class discussions, brief writing assignments, quizzes, and two formal essays, students will be invited to contribute to that same debate, firstly through study of selectedtexts that are at once literary, philosophical, and politically polemical, secondly by articulating responses to these texts that draw upon their own interests, experiences, and concernsincluding the knowledge and different disciplinary perspectives that they have gained in their other Core courses and their major and minor programs.