Sections offered FALL 2019:
#33529 |
EDWARD GUBAR |
TR 4:00pm-5:30pm
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HU 111
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COURSE ATTRIBUTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; IUB GenEd A&H credit. Class includes film showings on Thursday evenings.
What do you expect your future to be like? What would you like it to be? Do you want to be personally successful? Or do you want to live in a society that provides opportunities for all? Or both? Do you want to live a decent public and private and secret existence, if that’s possible? Humans have been considering and writing about individuals and societies for many centuries. About political and social organization, about equality, about love, about the environment, about war and violence, about misogyny, and about racism. What’s the best world to inhabit? What’s worst?
A utopia usually portrays an imagined society where things are perfect. Harmony, equality, happiness. Think Eden before the fall. A dystopia portrays an awful imagined society where people live dehumanized, unpleasant lives. Humans create literary utopias to enhance the possibilities of existence. We might not get there but it’s nice to think about and project better lives. Dystopias often show us worlds we might inhabit should various negative trends continue. Totalitarianism. Slavery. Ignorance. Extinction. On some level, utopias depend upon our human capacity for empathy. Conversely, dystopias often portray societies that lack empathy and welcome division and hierarchy. Ironically, one person’s utopia may be another’s dystopia, and one person’s dystopia may be another’s utopia. We will explore both genres.
Thomas More wrote the first literary utopia in 1516. He called it Utopia, a word that derives from Greek and translates as “nowhere”.
After reading More we will read both utopias and dystopias past and present. Writers may include Zamyatin, Kafka, Morris, Mitchell, Bradbury, Huxley, Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Piercy, LeGuin, Atwood, Callenbach, Dick, Rogers, Saunders, McCarthy, and Ishiguro. We may also watch a variety of films that portray both genres, some based on the works of the writers mentioned above (Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.) Other films may be included, like Lost Horizon and Ex Machina. We may also read nonfiction essays and books and watch films that address current issues, like climate change and social media, often from a dystopic perspective: Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and McKibben’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? may be on our reading list.
Required writing will include several short writing assignments and a final longer essay as well as a final exam. Class participation is required and will count at least a third of your grade. All assigned films will be shown on Thursday evenings, but most films are available to stream. How you choose to watch a film is up to you.