3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

This course examines how writers have imagined perfect, or at least vastly improved, human societies from antiquity through our own day. Topics of particular interest will be the relation between individual liberty and social cohesion in utopian schemes, views on the nature of happiness and justice, and speculations about the ease or arduousness with which utopia might be created or maintained. Authors to be studied may include Plato, Thomas More, Margaret Cavendish, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Octavia Butler.