ENG 377 LITERATURES OF UTOPIA

When Thomas More coined the term “utopia”—meaning “no place” or “not place”—in 1516, he gave an enduring name to literature of nonexistent worlds. This class will explore utopian fiction’s commitment to questioning labor, education, class, gender, sex, and ecologies—indeed every aspect of the social, political, and environmental organization of actually existing societies—as well as utopian literature's attempts to imagine other worlds into being. Readings may include Virgil, More, Margaret Cavendish, Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H.G. Wells, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Louise Erdrich.