First-Year Seminar: What We Might Have Been: Utopianism in American Literature

Over the last decade, dystopian fiction has become a pop culture fixture. The dismal futures of The Hunger Games, Netflix's Black Mirror, and Hulu's adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale are familiar to most students. In the midst of all this dystopia, this seminar asks: is there room for dystopia's positive counterpoint, Utopia? "What We Might Have Been" treats utopianism as a central idea in U.S. literary history. We will read fiction, nonfiction, and theory depicting societies that have fundamentally restructured work, family, and political life along various ideological lines, from feminism and Black nationalism to green anarchism and tecnho-libertarianism. These utopian texts allow us to dream of sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange solutions to the ongoing crises of our contemporary moment and provide an imaginative laboratory to test the consequences of different ways of organizing social, political, and economic life. In addition to the philosophical shades that utopianism takes, we will compare the various literary techniques and genres that authors have employed to express their visions. Throughout the seminar, we will interrogate the idea of America and ask the salient questions, Is another way possible? And can it happen here?