General Information
Course Description
9578 - The Concept of Utopia - Utopian studies is a vast and growing area. This course will concentrate 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 15th April, 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 Jan.): Orientation
Part I: Utopia and Modernity
Week Two (16 Jan.)
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Utopia and reality’ & ‘Utopia and the modern mind’, from Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976).
Krishan Kumar, ‘Aspects of the western utopian tradition’, from History of the Human Sciences (2003).
Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘The three faces of utopianism revisited’, Utopian Studies (1994).
Part II - Major Utopian Thinkers
Week Three (23 Jan.): Marx & Engels, Mannheim, Morris
Frederich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, from The Marx-Engels Reader (1978).
Karl Mannheim, ‘The utopian mentality', from Ideology and Utopia (1968).
Krishan Kumar, ‘News from nowhere: the renewal of utopia’, from History of Political Thought (1993).
Week Four (30 Jan.): Bloch
Ernst Bloch, ‘Indications of utopian content’ & ‘Theses’, from A Philosophy of the Future (1970).
Ernst Bloch, ‘Karl Marx, Death and the apocalypse’, from The Spirit of Utopia (2000).
Ernst Bloch, ‘Something’s missing: a discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the contradictions of utopian longing’, from The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (1988).
Week Five (6 Feb.): Benjamin and Marcuse
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the philosophy of history’, from Illuminations (1968)
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theological-political fragment’, from One-Way Street (1979).
Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the 19th Century’, from Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973).
Christine Buci-Glucksmann, ‘The utopia of the feminine: Benjamin’s trajectory’, from Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (1994).
Herbert Marcuse, ‘The end of utopia’, from Five Lectures (1970).
Week Six (13 Feb.): Jameson and Ricoeur
Frederic Jameson, ‘Reification and utopia in mass culture’, from Social Text (1979).
Fredric Jameson, ‘Ontology and utopia’, from L’Esprit Createur (1994).
Frederic Jameson, ‘The politics of utopia’, from New Left Review (2004).
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Ideology and utopia as cultural imagination’, from Philosophic Exchange (1976).
Part III: Utopia and its ‘isms’
Week Seven (20 Feb.): Anarchism, Feminism, Ecologism
Lucy Sargisson, ‘Feminism: setting the tone for a new utopianism’, from Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (1996).
Patrick Reedy, ‘Keeping the black flag flying: anarchy, utopia and the politics of nostalgia’, from Utopia and Organization (2003).
Murray Bookchin, ‘From here to there’, from Remaking Society (1989).
Week Eight (6 March): Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
Jean Baudrillard, ‘Dialectical utopia’ and ‘Utopia deferred’, from Utopia Deferred (2006).
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, from Diacritics (1986).
Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and utopia’, from Utopia Post Utopia (1988).
Gianni Vattimo, ‘From utopia to heterotopia‘ & ‘Utopia, counter-utopia, irony’ from The Transparent Society (1992).
Part IV: Debates and Issues
Week Nine (13 March): Against Utopia; right-wing utopianism
Charles Burdett, ‘Italian fascism and utopia’, from History of the Human Sciences (2003).
E. M. Cioran, ‘Mechanism of utopia’, from History and Utopia (1987).
Ruth Levitas, ‘New right utopias’, from Radical Philosophy (1985).
Karl Popper, ‘Utopia and violence’, from Conjectures and Refutations (1969).
Week Ten (20 March): Critical Utopianism
David Harvey, ‘Dialectical utopianism’, from Spaces of Hope (2000).
Michael Gardiner, ‘Bakhtin’s carnival: utopia as critique’, from Critical Studies (1993).
Ashlie Lancaster, ‘Instantiating critical utopias’, from Utopian Studies (2000).
Tom Moylan, ‘The utopian imagination’ & ‘The literary utopia’, from Demand the Impossible (1986).
Part V: Substantive Issues
Week Eleven (27 March): Utopia and Mass Culture
Ben Anderson, ‘A principle of hope: recorded music, listening practices and the immanence of utopia’, from Geografiska Annaler (2002).
David B. Morris, ‘Utopian bodies’, from Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998).
John O’Neill, ‘McTopia: eating time’, from Utopias and the Millennium (1993).
Mike Wayne, ‘Utopianism and film’, from Historical Materialism (2002).
Week Twelve (3 April): Urbanism, Architecture and Technology
David Pindar, ‘In defence of utopian urbanism: imaging cities after the “end of utopianism”’, from Geografiska Annaler (2002).
Simon Sadler, ‘A new Babylon: the city redesigned’, from The Situationist City (1998).
Alexander Wilson, ‘Technological utopias: world’s fairs and theme parks’, from The Culture of Nature (1991).
Pt. VI: The Future of Utopia
Week Thirteen (10 April): The Future of Utopia
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Utopia with no topos’, from History of the Human Sciences (2003).
Terry Eagleton, ‘Utopia and its opposites’, from Necessary and Unnecessary Utopias (2000).
Ruth Levitas, ‘For utopia: the (limits of the) utopian function in late capitalist society’, from The Philosophy of Utopia (2000).
Lucy Sargisson & Ruth Levitas, ‘Utopia in dark times: optimism/pessimism and utopia/dystopia’, from Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003).
