Course Description

Zoom Link for Preview Night (10/28/24 from 6:30pm-8:30pm)

Link: https://unm.zoom.us/j/97489480344 

Ever since Plato wrote The Republic, scholars have argued over whether this book represents Plato’s idea of a utopia – the ideal way to organize collective human life – that he intended as a blueprint for building the ideal city/society, or whether it is a warning about a dystopia, showing us the danger of trying to create the “perfect” society. This confusion runs through art, films, literature, and philosophy concerning the distinction between utopia and dystopia. For example, if you search IMDB (Internet Movie Database) for “all utopian movies”, Total Recall, The Matrix, and Gattaca come in at 1, 2, and 3, yet all of them are dystopian. So, what is the difference? And why are the overwhelming majority of films, books, and TV shows about societies of the future dystopian? What role should utopianism and dystopianism have in politics? Is utopianism destined to produce dystopias? There is a long history of attempts to create the perfect society and many warnings about what can go wrong. In this class, we will look at several famous visions of and theories for both utopia and dystopia in literature, philosophical texts, TV, and movies. We will see what lessons we can learn, both in terms of how we think about it as well as how and why we might create the ideal way to organize society such that everyone has a good chance of flourishing. This course is a thoroughly interdisciplinary liberal arts student-centered class that will engage critical and creative thought about the world we're in, how we got, here, where we might want to go, and how we might be able to get there.

This is not a lecture class, classes will center around activities including student-led discussions, Socratic style and other forms of debate, free-writing, elevator pitches, group work, Q and A sessions, mock conferences, interactive standard setting, and more.

Texts

There is no textbook for this course. Where possible free digital copies of all readings will be made available, including sections from John Rawl’s A Theory of Justice, Plato’s Republic, Marx’s Paris Manuscripts and Capital, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments & the Wealth of Nations, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, Murray Bookchin’s Social Ecology, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Trial of Eichmann, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Nineteen-eighty-four, and several political essays, Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World & The Island Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed,

Movies: Brazil, Star Trek the Next Generation (various episodes), Black Panther, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, Tomorrowland.

Requirements

Each sequence (3) will have one small writing assignment (SWA) and one major writing assignment (MWA) I may well add a weekly response paper and remove one or more of the SWAs depending on the students. These assignments will always include multiple multimodal options and allow for creative interpretation but will center around world-building typical of the discipline of futurism.

I expect the students to spend around 3 hours a week reading/writing 30 - 60 pages a week depending on if we are reading theoretical or literary material (this does not include time spent on assignments which will roughly be an additional 18-20 hours of week per semester)

About the Instructor(s): William Barnes