Utopias and Dystopias

Catalog description

Throughout history, great thinkers and social revolutionaries have imagined and created utopias' visionary communities embodying their ideals. Others, questioning the totalitarian impulses they believed lurked behind such utopian projects, have imagined dystopias that demonstrate the ways such projects might go awry. With attention to the shaping influences of social, political, and economic forces, Utopias and Dystopias Across Time will explore utopian and dystopian thought from the 16th-century to the present through works of literature, philosophy, architecture, and film. Course texts will include Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelasand More's Utopia; excerpts from Marx's the 1844 Manuscripts and The Communist Manifesto; excerpts from Bellamy's Looking Backward and Morris's News from Nowhere; excerpts from Robinson's Mars Trilogy; Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents; excerpts from Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time; and Anderson's Feed. Films will include Modern Times; Pleasantville; and Wall-E.