Utopia-Dystopia: Surveil/Cntrl

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Variously imagined in works as disparate as Gilgamesh, Plato’s Republic, and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, utopias are ultimately political visions. Though formally introduced as a term in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1551), the vision of a society where “all is well” and yet is “no place” has been revisited, reimagined, and inverted in hundreds of works of literature and film. Through primary and secondary texts, this course examines the philosophical, religious, political, cultural/historical underpinnings of the utopian vision and, conversely, the dystopian revision. The course will engage works such as Plato’s Republic and Laws, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Andreae’s Christianopolis, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (and the Hulu miniseries), and Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, among others. Dystopias feature surveillance and control of individuals through political, corporate, bureaucratic, technological, and sometimes philosophical or religious systems. Propelling the course are fundamental questions: What is the good society (and how to achieve it)? What accounts for the widespread popularity of dystopic literature, film, and television? How does a book like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four become embraced and weaponized today by conservatives and liberals alike? Where does social media fit on the utopian-dystopian scale? Whose facts? What facts? How does democracy survive in a world of “alternative facts”? In this class we will research such questions using interdisciplinary approaches that borrow from critical theory, philosophy, literature, and film, along with historical records and Internet data, among other sources.