230625 Island Stories: Utopia and Dystopia (S) (WiSe 2007/2008)

Ever since Platon's Politeia, writers have been fascinated by the idea of re-thinking and re-inventing social and political life, and islands have particularly attracted authors as settings for new, unthought-of conditions of imaginary societies. Manifest in the narrative subgenres of utopia and dystopia, islands have been cast in the guise of paradise or hell, to be compared and contrasted with contemporary conditions: They have been used as mental spaces for the projection of hopes and wishes as well as all sorts of cultural anxieties concerning politics, religion, science, and psychology. In this course, we will discuss five island narratives from the literary history of Britain from the Renaissance (Thomas More's short Utopia) to today (a recent novel by a British writer of Sri Lankan descent), and analyse their very different utopian or dystopian views and narrative techniques.

Texts: Please buy your own copies of

Thomas More, Utopia (1516) - preferred edition: Penguin Classics
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) - preferred edition: Penguin Classics
H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) - any edition
Aldous Huxley, Island (1962) - any edition
Romesh Gunesekera, Heaven's Edge (2002) - any edition