Utopias of Exclusion

Catalog description

“Utopias of Exclusion” is an interdisciplinary seminar focusing on premodern and early modern utopias in order to explore these paradise spaces and the dystopic elements within them, particularly confinement and exclusion. How do we define a utopia? What can utopian literature tell us about time and place? Why do utopias often require the exclusion of others or limit movement beyond a circumscribed place? How ideal are these “ideal” spaces, particularly if a utopia is a walled city? How can we analyze utopias through the lenses of history, feminism, queer theory, or the place of race, religion, or personal identity? In particular, this class asks us to consider more deeply how our own experiences with shelter-in-place rules and social distancing due to COVID-19, including remote learning, are aspects of even the most utopian societies, where walls that keep people out also keep people in. Readings may include selections from Plato's Republic, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, and John Milton’s Paradise Lost; as well as Aristophanes’s The Birds, Thomas More's Utopia, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a series of “Country House Poems” by early modern authors Aemilia Lanyer (“Description of Cookham”), Ben Jonson (“To Penshurst”), Andrew Marvell (“Upon Appleton House”), and Anne Finch (“Petition for an Absolute Retreat”) for an understanding of the countryside as a kind of paradise. We will also look at a contemporary perspective through Lois Lowry’s The Giver, and will end with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village to examine how walled utopias are depicted cinematically.