UTOPIAN LITERATURE

Oscar Wilde wrote that "a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth
glancing at." Ernst Bloch argued that in order to see our own world clearly "we need the most
powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness." For Wislawa Szymborska, Utopia was an island whose highlights included "The Tree of Understanding" and "the spring called Now I Get It." Latin American thinkers grappled with the concept, too, and Venezuelan novelist Arturo Uslar Pietri suggested that it was Columbus's voyages to the Americas that produced plausible space on the map for Utopia's appearance. At once political, aesthetic, and educational, Utopia began its lexical and political life in literature and has remained a feature in Transatlantic Western discourse from the age of colonial empires to our present-day debates on human rights and economic inequality.

In this course we will read and analyze the concept of Utopia from Columbus and Thomas More to the advent of modem socialism with special attention to the themes of economic inequality, gender emancipation, and the limits of cosmopolitan sensibility. We will also take care to look at essays and manifestoes as well as utopian novels, and to include Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. Readings by Tommaso Campanella, Margaret Cavendish, Madame de Stael, Friedrich Engels, Juan Bautista Alberdi, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Magda Portal.