Imagined Worlds: Now and Then

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Since its first uses in the Sixteenth Century, the term utopia meant both "good place" and "no place." Thus, the concept carried two different ideas in its own meaning, an ideal society and an unreachable one. In the past years, the concept—as well as its opposite, dystopia—has been applied to explain literary representations of imagined worlds that hold a mirror up to our own "real" world. Analyzing and discussing cultural products that create, depict, and represent invented societies is, without a doubt, a good path to understand and to critique key aspects of this complex world we live in today. In this class, we will study Early Modern Hispanic texts (written by Late Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque authors) as well as contemporary fictions (films, short stories, plays) that have in common their way to create and describe imagined/utopian/dystopian universes. We will pay specific attention to descriptions of imagined places in order to see how they explore real tensions around class, gender, society, religion, racial identities, imperial subjects, and power. During the semester, we will read texts written by Cervantes, Colón, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Cortés, Gracián, Vespucio, Nieremberg, and Fuentelapeña and will watch and analyze films such as Children of Men, Blade Runner, Pan's Labyrinth, Avatar, Elysium, among other contemporary works.