This course proposes an examination of the genre of utopian prose fiction from the perspective of the construction and portrayal of gender. Though the main focus of our attention will remain firmly fixed in the seventeenth century by way of a sustained examination of the century’s single female-authored work of utopian science fiction, the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, we will also reach across centuries of literary history to examine this text in light of more recent twentieth-century female-authored utopian and dystopian fiction. The focus of this course is therefore split between Margaret Cavendish’s utopian imagining of a Blazing World populated by anthropomorphic bear-, worm-, and fish-men and excerpts from two twentieth-century works of the utopian (and dystopian) genre: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s female-exclusive Herland and the haunting near-future dystopia of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. In addition to studying these texts as words on the page, we will also engage with other popular representations of utopia in the form of both graphic novels (or comic book depictions) and film.
- Enseignant·e: Nadine Weiss