ENGL 236
Fields of Barley, Streets of Gold: Utopia in Fiction Fall 2021
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Each of the gates was a single pearl: And the street of the city was pure gold, As it were transparent glass. Revelations 21:21 It makes us happy to imagine the future in apocalyptic terms, partly because we love to say I told you so. You didn’t listen, and now look. Fort Lee is on fire, and zombies are smashing down your parents’ door. Catastrophe satisfies us on many levels; by contrast, the utopian vision provides a more delicate thrill. For a writer, the task is to provide a fiction that will not feel like a moral lesson or the illustration of some theory about how we should behave. This course will consider different utopian stories in a vaguely chronological sequence: Classical Era, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and then moving through the 19th and 20th centuries, and then into modern science fiction. You’d be right if you think this sounds as if I haven’t yet finalized the list, but it will include familiar and unfamiliar names–Plato, More, Bacon, Campanella, Fourier, Bellamy, Skinner, LeGuin, Bisson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and various Afro-Futurists. Mostly you will be reading (or else listening to the instructor describe) excerpts and summaries rather than full texts, as utopian visions are often quite long and we want to consider large numbers of them. The emphasis in this class will be on writing rather than reading. Most assignments will consist of either sketching out or actually writing a short story set in one of these imagined worlds, a story that would serve as a critique. In addition, as a final project, students will invent a personal utopia and present it to the class.