JAN 321 - Utopias and Imaginary Societies

Type:  In-Person

Course Meeting Days & Times: MTThF, 12:00 PM-2:30 PM

Instructor(s): Gorsch, Robert

Email: rgorsch@stmarys-ca.edu

Fee: $0

Course Description:  Utopia means “no place” and Sir Thomas More invented the name in the early 1500s during a time of geographical and ethnographic discovery and revived knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman world.   More’s famous Utopia was the first in a long line of modern representations of Imaginary societies, in books with titles like  The City of the Sun, The New Atlantis, “A Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms,” Erewhon, and News from Nowhere.  While More’s own ultimate model seems to have been Plato’s Republic, and he described his Utopia as being about “the best state of a republic [i.e., commonwealth],” the books of his successors seem to inhabit, each with its special positioning, a mental realm ranging from sober serious plans for reforming the world to ingenious exercises in satire and fantasy.  Even Utopia itself leaves some readers wondering whether it should be read as a political blueprint or rather as, in C. S. Lewis’s words, “a spontaneous overflow of intellectual high spirits, a revel of debate, paradox, comedy and (above all) of invention.”

This long line of imagined societies reveals timeless concerns about how societies should be organized and what sort of happiness is possible for human beings individually and collectively.  But the centuries after More were also a time of new lands, new cultures, new science, new inventions, and new technology, and these books also reflect the gradual emergence of the modern world as we know it and the triumph of the “machine age.”  Authors read will include Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, St. Thomas More, Francois Rabelais, Michel de Montaigne, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, the Duchess of Newcastle, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Butler, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris.

Prerequisites & Notes
None

Credits: 3