General Information
Course Description
9578 - The Concept of Utopia [B] Prof. Michael Gardiner
Utopian studies is a vast and growing area. This will be an interdisciplinary course concentrating on four main areas: i) the intellectual and historical contexts that helped to produce the Western utopian tradition under the regime of modernity; ii) an examination of the main C19th and C20th theorists of utopia, especially Marx and Engels, Mannheim, Benjamin, Bloch, Marcuse, Jameson, and Ricoeur; iii) utopia and its appropriation by various ‘isms’, including feminism, anarchism and postmodernism; and iv) current debates within utopian studies, including arguments for and against utopianism, alternative conceptions of utopia (such as the ‘critical’ or ‘dialectical’ utopia), dystopia and the question of violence, and the relation between utopianism, technology and mass culture.
REQUIREMENTS AND ASSIGNMENTS
This course is seminar-based, and hence reading and writing intensive. The required readings are intended to give students as broad a comprehension of the key debates and issues in each area of utopian studies as possible. Each student will be expected to give two oral presentations based on class readings, and submit this in written form a week after the presentation (about 2,000-2,500 words); each will be worth 15% of the final grade. Students will also be expected to write one term paper due 9th Dec., 25 pages (typed, double-spaced, 12-scale font, 8,000-10,000 words), worth 55% of the total grade. Students are encouraged to formulate their own essay topics and negotiate these with the instructor. The remaining 15% is awarded for class participation and attendance. (The only acceptable excuses for missed deadlines will be for documented medical reasons or family bereavement/illness; late papers will otherwise be docked 0.3% per day.) All papers submitted will be included as source documents in the reference database for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of papers subsequently submitted to the system. Use of the service is subject to licensing agreement, currently between the University of Western Ontario and Turnitin.com (http://www.turnitin.com).
SEMINAR SCHEDULE AND COURSE READINGS
Week One (9 Sept.): Orientation
Part I: Utopia and Modernity
Week Two (16 Sept.)
1) Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The three faces of utopianism revisited’, Utopian Studies, 4(1), 1994: 1-37.
2) Krishan Kumar, ‘Aspects of the western utopian tradition’, History of the Human Sciences, 16(1), 2003: 63-77.
3) Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Utopia and reality’ & ‘Utopia and the modern mind’, Socialism: The Active Utopia. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976: 9-37; 143-44.
Part II - Major Utopian Thinkers
Week Three (23 Sept.): Marx & Engels, Mannheim, Morris
4) Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978: 683-717.
5) Charles Fourier, ‘The system of passionate attraction’, French Utopians: An Anthology of Ideal Societies, Frank E. Manuel & Fritzie P. Manuel (eds). New York: The Free Press, 1966: 299-328.
6) Karl Mannheim, ‘The utopian mentality', Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968: 192-263.
7) Krishan Kumar, ‘News from nowhere: the renewal of utopia’, History of Political Thought, 14(1), 1993: 133-143.
Week Four (30 Sept.): Bloch
8) Ernst Bloch, ‘Indications of utopian content’ and ‘Theses’, A Philosophy of the Future. New York: Herder & Herder, 1970: 84-144.
9) Ernst Bloch, ‘Introduction’, The Principle of Hope: Vol. 1. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press, 1986: 3-18.
10) Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s missing: a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the contradictions of utopian longing’, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press, 1988: 1-17.
Week Five (7 Oct.): Benjamin and Marcuse
11) Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken Books, 1968: 253-264.
12) Walter Benjamin, ‘Theological-political fragment’, One-Way Street. London: Verso, 1979: 155-6.
13) Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Verso, 1973: 157-76.
14) Michael Löwy, “Religion, utopia and counter-modernity: The allegory of the angel of history in Walter Benjamin’, Social Compass, 36(1), 1989: 95-104.
15) Herbert Marcuse, ‘The end of utopia’, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970: 62-82.
Week Six (14 Oct.): Jameson and Ricoeur
16) Frederic Jameson, ‘Reification and utopia in mass culture’, Social Text, 1, 1979: 130-48.
17) Fredric Jameson, ‘Ontology and utopia’, L’Esprit Createur, 34(4), 1994: 46-65.
18) Frederic Jameson, ‘The politics of utopia’, New Left Review, 25, Jan-Feb, 2004: 35-54.
19) Paul Ricoeur, ‘Ideology and utopia as cultural imagination’, Philosophic Exchange, 2(2), 1976: 17-28.
Part III: Utopia and its ‘isms’
Week Seven (21 Oct.): Anarchism, Feminism, Ecologism
20) Lucy Sargisson, ‘Feminism: setting the tone for a new utopianism’, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism. London: Routledge, 1996: 64-97.
21) Patrick Reedy, ‘Keeping the black flag flying: anarchy, utopia and the politics of nostalgia’, Utopia and Organization, Martin Parker (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 169-88.
22) Murray Bookchin, ‘From here to there’, Remaking Society. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989: 159-204.
Week Eight (28 Oct.): Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
23) Jean Baudrillard, ‘Dialectical utopia’ and ‘Utopia deferred’, Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978). New York: Semiotexte, 2006: 31-2; 61-3.
24) Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16(1), 1986: 22-7.
25) Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and utopia’, Utopia Post Utopia: Configurations of Nature and Culture in Recent Sculpture and Photography. Boston: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988: 11-32.
26) Gianni Vattimo, ‘From utopia to heterotopia‘ and ‘Utopia, counter-utopia, irony’, The Transparent Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992: 62-89.
Part IV: Debates and Issues
Week Nine (4 Nov.): Against Utopia; right-wing utopianism
27) Charles Burdett, ‘Italian fascism and utopia’, History of the Human Sciences, 16(1), 2003: 93-108.
28) E. M. Cioran, ‘Mechanism of utopia’, History and Utopia. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1987: 80-98.
29) Ruth Levitas, ‘New right utopias’, Radical Philosophy, 39, Spring, 1985: 2-9.
30) Karl Popper, ‘Utopia and violence’, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic Books, 1962: 355-63.
Week Ten (11 Nov.): Critical Utopianism
31) David Harvey, ‘Dialectical utopianism’, Spaces of Hope. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000: 182-96.
32) Michael Gardiner, ‘Bakhtin’s carnival: utopia as critique’, Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin, Caryl Emerson (ed.) New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1993: 252-77.
33) Ashlie Lancaster, ‘Instantiating critical utopias’, Utopian Studies, 11(1 ), 2000: 109-19.
34) Tom Moylan, ‘The utopian imagination’ and ‘The literary utopia’, Demand the Impossible. London: Methuen, 1986: 15-52; 214-18.
Part V: Substantive Issues
Week Eleven (18 Nov.): Utopia and Mass Culture
35) Ben Anderson, ‘A principle of hope: recorded music, listening practices and the immanence of utopia’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 84(3-4), 2002: 211-27.
36) David B. Morris, ‘Utopian bodies’, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1998: 135-63; 302-7.
37) John O’Neill, ‘McTopia: eating time’, Utopias and the Millennium, Stephen Bann and Krishan Kumar (eds.). London: Reaktion Books: 129-37.
38) Mike Wayne, ‘Utopianism and film’, Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory, 10(4), 2002: 135-54.
Week Twelve (25 Nov.): Urbanism, Architecture and Technology
39) David Pindar, ‘In defence of utopian urbanism: imaging cities after the “end of utopianism”’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 84(3-4), 2002: 229-41.
40) Simon Sadler, ‘A new Babylon: the city redesigned’, The Situationist City. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press, 1998: 105-55; 187-99.
41) Alexander Wilson, ‘Technological utopias: world’s fairs and theme parks’, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991: 157-90.
Pt. VI: The Future of Utopia
Week Thirteen (2 Dec.): The Future of Utopia
42) Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Utopia with no topos’, History of the Human Sciences, 16(1), 2003: 11-25.
43) Terry Eagleton, ‘Utopia and its opposites’, Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias, Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds.), Socialist Register, London: The Merlin Press Ltd., 2000: 31-40.
44) Ruth Levitas, ‘For utopia: the (limits of the) utopian function in late capitalist society’, The Philosophy of Utopia, Barbara Goodwin (ed.). London: F. Cass, 2000: 25-43.
45) Lucy Sargisson & Ruth Levitas, ‘Utopia in dark times: optimism/pessimism and utopia/dystopia’, Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (eds.). London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 13-27.
