SELCS

Utopias and Dystopias in twentieth century literature


Course code: ELCS6041
Tutor: Ruth Austin
Level: intermediate
Mode of Assessment: 2 assessed essays of 2000 words each
Term: taught in term 1

Course Description:
Through the study of some of the most controversial and celebrated examples of what may be termed as utopian, anti-utopian and dystopian literature this seminar will explore key elements of dystopian / anti-utopian literature from the twentieth century. The seminar examines themes such as the control and manipulation of language, as well as religion, history and gender and considers the way in which the contemporary can be explored in an imagined future. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) is set in an isolated society made up entirely of women and engages with issues relating to gender identity in the early part of the twentieth century. Brave New World (1931) in an imagined future engages with questions of identity, mass production, homogenization post World War One. Ernst Jünger in The Glass Bees (1957) imagines a society in which technology controls the lives of people in an un-named post-war society. In A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess experiments with the use of language in a text which engages with questions about violence and free-will. J. G. Ballard’s A Drowned World (1962) is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which only remnants of society and social order remain.

Primary Texts:

  • Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (any edition)
  • Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (any edition)
  • Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees (NY: New York Review of Books, 2000, translators: Bogan and Meyer) [Ernst Jünger, Gläserne Bienen (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957)]
  • Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (any edition)
  • J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (London: Harper Perennial, 2006)

Initial Secondary Bibliography:

  • M. Keith Booker, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994)
  • M. Keith Booker, The dystopian impulse in modern literature: fiction as social criticism (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1994)
  • Gregory Claeys, ed, The Cambridge companion to utopian literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  • Thomas Moylan, Scraps of the untainted sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia (Boulder, CO; Oxford: Westview Press, 2000)