Studies in 18th-Century Literature (441-0-20)

Topic

Novel Utopias: Critique and Normativity in 18th Ce

Instructors

Vivasvan Soni

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

The utopian tradition plays a significant role in the emergence of the novel in the eighteenth century. Novels often include embedded utopias within them, so much so that these might be considered a "chronotope" of the early novel. On the face of it, this is paradoxical. Utopias portray visions of idealized societies, while novels operate in the mode of a critical realism scrutinizing the present. In this class, we will try to understand the place of utopian thinking in eighteenth-century novels. Are utopianism and realism at odds in the early novel? Does the critical potential of realism need the normative guidance of utopian thought to be effective? Why do embedded utopias become more scarce in later novels, and how is realism able to get along without them?

This class will read an array of early novels with embedded utopias. (Possibilities include: Cervantes, Don Quixote; Swift, Gulliver's Travels (book 4); Mandeville, Fable of the Bees; Fielding, Joseph Andrews; Rousseau, Julie; Goethe, Wilhelm Meister; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.) We will also read a selection of early utopias such as More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis. Alongside these texts, we will read contemporary critical writing about utopias (Bloch, Jameson), realism (Watt, Lukacs, Jameson) and the crisis of ends-oriented thinking in eighteenth century ethics and politics (Horkheimer, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Pfau). Our aim will be to arrive at an account of the function of the "embedded utopia" chronotope in early novels.