LITR 5737 Literary and Historical Utopias UHCL lecture notes

review Tuesday; LITR 5731

final exam, grade reports

discussion: Cindy Goodson

[break & evaluations]

conclude discussion

Tuesday previewed Paradise as an outstanding African American text with identifiable utopian themes and two virtual-reality novels that represent "virtual utopias"

Paradise can definitely work in the course in a long semester, but book is too long and hard-to-read for summer school

+ research / thematic possibilities: the title!; "The Dream" as exodus narrative; town-frozen-in-time and "Convent" as utopian models

Plans for seminar: I'll develop an objective based on exam question A2, following the

Topic A2. (Objectives 3c & 3f)
Objective 3c asks, "Is the utopian impulse universal, or is it unique to western civilization?" Objective 3f asks, "What social structures, units, or identities does utopia expose or frustrate?" and refers to "ethnicity" as one such identity. How do you reconcile utopia's pretensions to universality with modern needs for multicultural applications?

If course goes into long semester, add Paradise or another classic text like Invisible Man

If summer, I'll try something like this summer once more but preview multicultural aspect more and find ways to accommodate legitimate concerns.

+ research / thematic possibilities: man & woman meet in cyberspace as Adam and Eve in world created by humans

but both Snow Crash and Circuit of Heaven present same practical problem as slave narratives and some other multicultural texts

Add a historical presentation on "virtual utopias" specifying sites like Second World, the Sims, etc.

original source of personal awareness of 7th-Day Adventists as multicultural religious group (though here they're still 99% white)

In text, any clues as to connection b/w millennialism / utopianism and multiculturalism?

1a. How to define the literary genre of “utopias?” What elements and difficulties repeatedly appear? What audiences are involved or excluded?

1b. What different genres contribute to, interface with, or branch from utopia? Examples: dystopia, ecotopia, Socratic dialogue, tract, propaganda, satire, science fiction, fantasy, novel / romance, adventure / travel narrative. Others?

(Diaries as components of fictional works have a long pedigree. "Epistolary novels" feature letters that tell a novel's story but in place of letters you may find extended diary or journal entries--e. g., Robinson Crusoe, Dracula)

2a. What kinds of stories rise from or fit with the attempt to describe an ideal or dystopian community? . . .

2c. What tensions rise between the author’s description of a social theory and the reader’s demand for a story?

Questions: How well does Ecotopia work as engaging or affective fiction as opposed to didactic or instructional literature?

Overall I think the characters aren't great, but the plot is about as good as one can manage for didactic purposes.

How would you describe the plot? What other texts or narratives are analogous, in this course or beyond?

Topic A2. (Objectives 3c & 3f)
Objective 3c asks, "Is the utopian impulse universal, or is it unique to western civilization, esp. in its modern phase?" Objective 3f asks, "What social structures, units, or identities does utopia expose or frustrate?" and refers to "ethnicity" as one such identity. How do you reconcile utopia's pretensions to universality with modern needs for multicultural applications?

+ concluding kidnapping experience fuses personal and social experiences--is he being held against his will, or becoming part of a community?--how much like a cult experience?

Summary: Ultimately what is the goal, plan or plot of Ecotopia? To me, its multi-themed:

1) Callenbach is illustrating the importance of getting high regularly…(kidding)

One of the eco-system’s objectives is to establish a stable state by the implementation of a food cycle in which all food wastes, sewage and garbage are to be turned into organic fertilizer and applied to the land, where it would again enter into the food production cycle. Which after really thinking about it I thought might not be so bad considering what the asst. minister of foods said during the interview, “If, for instance, we had continued your practice of ‘free’ disposal of waste in water-courses, sooner or later somebody else would have had to calculate (and bear) the costs of the resulting dead rivers and lakes. We prefer to do it ourselves.” Pg 18-19. We know, or should know that we need to just smoke more weed and ingest less insecticides, herbicides and pesticides we’re a totally toxic nation and our economy is concerned about pretty packaged foods – our apples are pretty but just layered with plastic red coating it seems.

What are some other major themes? Discuss at least two more. If you don’t speak up I’ll call you out!

How about San Francisco as a Nation? How did they establish Independence and become this ‘High-Land’?

1b. What different genres contribute to, interface with, or branch from utopia? Primarily wrt: dystopia, ecotopia, fantasy, novel / romance, adventure / travel narrative. Others?

“The propensity of Ecotopians to touch one another is remarkable. To most Americans, it is offensive to be touched familiarly by a stranger,…Acquaintances routinely shake hands whenever they meet, even if they have seen each other a few hours before, with novel arm-to-arm clasp. When people sit down to talk, they snuggle up to each other or interlace arms or legs quite intimately….To us, such behavior is a forbidden fantasy. The Ecotopians act out such fantasies all the time. They bathe and take steam baths together freely…….Old friends who have not seen each other for some time customarily give each other a warm extended embrace, and occasionally they even excuse themselves and go off to a private place, evidently for sexual purposes. Naked massage is a common group amusement.

Any others good examples of obj. 1b? (What different genres contribute to, interface with, or branch from utopia?)

3f. What social structures, units, or identities does utopia expose or frustrate? What changes result in child-rearing, marriage, aging, sexuality, etc.? (Social units or structures: person/individual/self, gender, sex, family [nuclear or extended], community, village/town/city, class, ethnicity, farm, region, tribe, clan, union, nation, ecosystem, planet.)

Wrt family talk a bit about the sacrificial mock or symbolic crucifixion during the war games: pg 79

objective 4c. How do literature and literacy appear in utopian or dystopian cultures?

Larger question: What kind of scholarship / research might you undertake with utopian literature?

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Interdisciplinary conferences: Society for Utopian Studies, Center for Millennial Studies

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"Discourse Studies"--cf. "Literature of Ideas" and yesterday's discussion connecting Ecotopia's "social costs" with "social capital" in "Bowling Alone"
--how do literary texts interact with scholarly or popular texts? How are ideas or subjects changed or developed from one text, genre, or period to another?
--Discourse Studies at Texas A&M

Intertextuality: Tracing recurrent phenomena or forms from one text to another, making texts talk to each other

Question: How do utopian novels represent novels or other literary genres as parts or expressions of utopian or dystopian communities?

34 6 hrs of labor . . . not to abuse that interval to luxury and idleness, but must employ it in some proper exercise according to their various inclinations, which is for the most part reading.

46 taught to spend hours in which they are not obliged to work in reading . . . whole progress of life

56 [classical library given to Utopians by Raphael and other visitors] Plato, Aristotle, Theoprastus [torn up by a monkey], Hesichius, Dioscorides, Plutarch, Lucian, Aristophanes, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles of Aldus's edition; Thucydides, Herodotus and Herodian, . . . Hippocrates, Galen . . . .

116 (ch. 15) Mrs. Leete: "Ah, what would I give if I had not already read Berrian's novels." . . .
Dr. Leete: "It has been an era of unexampled intellectual splendor!"

I sat up in my room that night reading "Penthesilia" till it grew gray in the east, and did not lay it down till I had finished it. And yet let no admirer of the great romancer of the twentieth century resent my saying that at the first reading what most impressed me was not so much what was in the book as what was left out of it. The story-writers of my day would have deemed the making of bricks without straw a light task compared with the construction of a romance from which should be excluded all effects drawn from the contrasts of wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, coarseness and refinement, high and low, all motives drawn from social pride and ambition, the desire of being richer or the fear of being poorer, together with sordid anxieties of any sort for one's self or others; a romance in which there should, indeed, be love galore, but love unfretted by artificial barriers created by differences of station or possessions, owning no other law but that of the heart. The reading of "Penthesilia" was of more value than almost any amount of explanation would have been in giving me something like a general impression of the social aspect of the twentieth century. The information Dr. Leete had imparted was indeed extensive as to facts, but they had affected my mind as so many separate impressions, which I had as yet succeeded but imperfectly in making cohere. Berrian put them together for me in a picture.

Instructor's note: function of representative or creative literature as ground where all meets more or less, in comparison with more specialized fields of study or creation.

p. 46 (ch. 4) They brought us books, in greater numbers, and I began to study them seriously.

"Pretty punk literature," Terry burst forth one day, when we were in the privacy of our own room. "Of course one expects to begin on child-stories, but I would like something more interesting now."

"Can't expect stirring romance and wild adventure without men, can you?" I asked. Nothing irritated Terry more than to have us assume that there were no men; but there were no signs of them in the books they gave us, or the pictures.

Jeff, who was never without reading matter of some sort, had two little books with him, a novel and a little anthology of verse; and I had one of those pocket encyclopedias -- a fat little thing, bursting with facts. These were used in our education -- and theirs. Then as soon as we were up to it, they furnished us with plenty of their own books, and I went in for the history part -- I wanted to understand the genesis of this miracle of theirs.

102 Their child-literature was a wonderful thing. I could have spent years following delicate subtleties, the smooth simplicities with which they had bent that great art to the service of the child mind.

[Instructor's question: does "child-literature" mean literature for or about children? Probably find out from reading some more Gilman.]

Terry: "I tell you the higher grades of life are reached only through struggle -- combat. There's no Drama here. Look at their plays! They make me sick."

He rather had us there. The drama of the country was -- to our taste -- rather flat. You see, they lacked the sex motive and, with it, jealousy. They had no interplay of warring nations, no aristocracy and its ambitions, no wealth and poverty opposition.

I see I have said little about the economics of the place; it should have come before, but I'll go on about the drama now.

They had their own kind. There was a most impressive array of pageantry, of processions, a sort of grand ritual, with their arts and their religion broadly blended. The very babies joined in it. To see one of their great annual festivals, with the massed and marching stateliness of those great mothers, the young women brave and noble, beautiful and strong; and then the children, taking part as naturally as ours would frolic round a Christmas tree -- it was overpowering in the impression of joyous, triumphant life.

They had begun at a period when the drama, the dance, music, religion, and education were all very close together; and instead of developing them in detached lines, they had kept the connection. . . .

27-8 Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to one of the City Halls, for the Social Meeting. . . . [T]he Councils of the different Homes stand in a pulpit, and they speak to us of our duties and of our brother men. Then visiting Leaders mount the pulpit and they read to us the speeches which were made in the City Council that day . . . . Then we sing hymns, the Hymn of Brotherhood . . . . Then the bell rings and we walk in a straight column to the City Theatre for three hours of Social Recreation. There a play is shown upon the stage, with two great choruses from the Home of the Actors, which speak and answer all together, in two great voices. The plays are about toil and how good it is. Then we walk back to the Home . . . .

We found a room with walls made of shelves, which held rows of manuscripts . . . . Never had we seen such a number of them, nor of such strange shape. . . . Tomorrow, we shall begin to read these scripts.

98 It was when I read the first of the books I found in my house that I saw the word "I." . . .

58 "It's better to teach people than to scare them . . . . lose their fear . . . harder to scare them a second time"

158 Ecotopian novels . . . security, almost like 19c English novels; world is decent, satisfactory, sustaining despite some difficulties . . . . At first the stories seemed puzzlingly vapid to me. I couldn’t figure out why anybody would find them interesting . . . How come they didn't have that exciting nightmare quality? Some of them even have happy endings. . . . After a while, they seem more like life--okay to spend time with, reassuring. Come to think of it, Ecotopia itself is beginning to feel a good deal more reassuring: when I needed care, I was taken care of.

reflexivity increased, pronounced--a text thinks about itself, what it is or isn't

3a. What relations develop between fictional and actual utopian communities? What has been the historical impact of utopian fictions?

Compared to most novels, utopian novels emphasize "inform" rather than "entertain"

Utopian novels-within-novels acknowledge "This may look boring" but ask you to stay with the reading experience and discover otherwise.

further primary research: What happens just before and after such discussions of novels or other literary arts? Any consistencies in patterns?

But a story brings ideas to greater vividness and life, showing how various ideas about politics, economics, social structures, families, gender form a complete world.

Model for civil discussion, text as neutral ground on which differing people may meet and disagree but keep talking instead of fighting

4d. How may a seminar classroom serve as a microcosm, model, or alternative for American culture?