Utopia, Distopia, and the End of the World

Course Sylabus

FSEM 1111: Utopia, Distopia,

and the End of the World

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‘Utopia’ is often defined as an imaginary ideal civilization. In ‘Utopia’ Sir Thomas More writes of an island enjoying a perfect economic, social, legal, and political system. Sounds great. Yet to call someone a ‘utopian’ today is generally regarded as a perjorative comment. The very ideas of ‘Utopia’ and ‘Utopians’ are maligned in literature, film, and political discourse. From Darwin to Malthus to Adam Smith to contemporary films like ‘The Matrix’ and Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’– the nature of the human condition remains contested, and human progress is in no way guaranteed. This course explores ideas of ‘Utopia’, ‘Distopia’, and ‘The End of the World’ in literature and film. Questions to be answered by the students will be: “What is the best of all possible worlds?”, and, “What, if anything, will I do to create them?” We will explore these questions by reading literature on ideas of utopia and watching and discussing several movies that mock ideas of utopia from various angles: (overpopulation, bio-disaster, nuclear disaster, ecological collapse, totalitarian political nightmare, etc.). Students will write three short papers associated with these ideas and learn to digitally edit a feature film and present their 20 minute synopsis to the class.

SAMPLE STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS

Student Movie Projects

Samples of Student Papers

Books Movies

Utopia by Thomas More Soylent Green Lost Horizon

Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach The Corporation Koyannisqatsi

Candide by Voltaire Other Movies to be determined

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Interesting NYTimes piece on Ernest Callenbach

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/the-ecotopiast-who-glimpsed-the-future/?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20120509

Help With Writing Papers: I encourage you to take advantage of the Writing and Research Center’s services; writers from all skill levels benefit from feedback. The Center offers one-on-one consultations that address everything from brainstorming and developing ideas to crafting strong sentences and documenting sources. For more information, call 303-871-7431 or stop by the Penrose Library Monday-Thursday 9 am - 6 pm and Fridays 10 am - 3 pm.

Tentative Schedule of Topics

Week 0: Dialogs and Destinations

Interspersed with the natural and necessary protocols of the “Dialogs and Destinations” Orientation activities I will introduce the course. This will involve a hike to ‘Devil’s Head’, followed by a movie and a dinner at my house. The movie will be: Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937). The dinner discussion will focus on the idea of ‘Utopia’ in both a general sense and from ideas presented in the movie. We will also play a parlour game based on suggestions as to what movies and books we should read in the class. As we return to DU all students will be handed their first reading assignment: Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (edited by Edward Surtz, S.J.). The students will be warned that this is the most ‘stilted’ academic’ text they will be assigned but begged to bear with it because of its seminal nature.

Week 1: Protocols, 1^st Writing Assignment, and a Movie

Day #1: Hand out syllabus. Assign First Paper (10% of course grade): A one to two page paper defining Utopia and Utopians. Discuss this assignment. We will have a free ranging discussion on ideas of Utopia including ideas presented in Capra’s movie: Lost Horizon. Discussion of what we may have read in More’s Utopia – it’s style and its conclusions. A Question to ponder: Is Utopia about economic arrangements, and legal enforcement of those arrangements in a meritocracy? (Star Trek might come up as an example…). Introduce and motivate our next movie: “Soylent Green”.

Movie Day #2.

Week 2: Discuss First Writing Assignment; Assign Second, and another movie.

Day #1: Collect Week #1’s writing assignment. Discuss student’s ideas as developed in their first paper. Discuss “Soylent Green”. Discuss the general ideas of distopia that will manifest in the movies we will watch throughout the course (e.g. overpopulation (Soylent Green), nuclear war (On the Beach), religious intolerance (The Handmaid’s tale), etc.). Assign 2^nd paper: ‘Characterize the types of distopia presented in movies, literature, and popular discourse. Assess their respective probabilities. Present an appropriate human response to these threats.’ (Note: 1^st Draft is 10% of your grade (Due Week #4), Final Draft is 15% (Due Week #6). Digital Video Editing Workshop Using Soylent Green as an Example.

Movie Day #2 (Soylent Green): Watch the movie “Soylent Green”. Briefly introduce movie as an element of ‘cultural literacy’, motivate need to strip movies like this down to salient points for instructional purposes (and later movie-editing assignment), note the ‘objectification of women’ in this movie (women are referred to as ‘furniture’) link ideas to our Second reading: Ernest Callenbach’s: Ecotopia (students will have two weeks to read this book).

Week 3: Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy, Matriarchy as a Utopian ideal, and a movie.

Day #1: Discuss Riane Eislers’s book The Chalice and the Blade. How were the matriarchies presented in the book different from society today? Were they utopias? Were they viable? Continue discussions on various types of distopia presented in various movies relevant to 2^nd writing assignment.

Movie Day #2 (The Handmaid’s Tale): A religion and under-population distopia involving offensive subjugation of women. Discuss parallels to recent distopia movie: ‘Children of Men’. Contrast with overpopulation in “Soylent Green”

Week 4: Student Feedback on potential distopias and their likelihoods and a movie.

Day #1: Collect 2^nd writing assignment. Engage students in discussion of what they wrote about in this first draft: What are common distopia themes and which ones strike you as likely? Have a discussion contrasting Thomas More’s ideas of Utopia with Riane Eisler’s. Raise the question: Is Thomas More’s Utopia a serious blue-print for a real place based on Plato’s Republic or is it a satire? Introduce and motivate next day’s movie.

Movie Day #2 (Special Bulletin): This film is a ‘war of the worlds-like’ movie that freaked out a lot of people back in the late 1980’s that is about a nuclear terrorist incident in South Carolina. Makes a mockery of the media and does not provide a happy ending. Key point about this movie is the ending. The bomb does go off. Not like in 24. No happy ending. Raises interesting questions about the likelihood of various distopia scenarios. Raises interesting questions about the inevitability of human progress.

Week 5: Psychological Takes on Utopia, 3^rd Reading assingment, and another movie.

Day #1: Return graded 1^st drafts of student papers. Discuss competing ideas of Utopia: Economic Meritocracy on a geographically protected island (Thomas More’s idea), Matriarchy (Riane Eisler’s), Psychological (Candide’s ‘Best of all possible worlds.’), and ‘Off the grid, ecologically sustainable, survivalist communities’ (Alan Weisman’s Gaviotas). Assign 3^rd reading: Voltaire’s Candide (students have one week to read this short work). Introduce and motivate the movie: Brazil.

Movie Day #2 (Brazil): Reality in the movie Brazil is an Orwellian governmental bureaucracy failing to manage a chaos of terrorism in an urban distopia. The friends and associates of the protagonist are all blissfully in denial of this reality as the protagonist becomes aware of it and fights the evil government with the Robert de Niro character. Protagonist also has a rich fantasy life. Different endings to movie will be explored in light of discussion of Candide reading.

Week 6: Contrasting ideas that present Utopia as a naïve fantasy

Day #1: Collect Rewrite of Assignment #2. An instructor led Socratic lecture to initiate a discussion centered about four great and influential books: The Bible, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, and Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Summary of the main ideas in these books followed by question led discussion as to how they pertain to ideas of and potential for utopia and or distopia. Instructor will lead a discussion contrasting ideas of cultural and biological evolution and teleological ideas that many people ascribe to them. Assign 4^th (last reading); Gaviotas by Alan Weisman. Assign final paper asking students to paint a picture of their idea of Utopia, assess how realistic their ideal world is, describe what they think the near future will really look like, and explain how they hope to live in it.

Day #2: (No Movie Week 6) Open discussion to encourage formulation of ideas and approaches to the final paper. Strong suggestions will be made to get this paper done early so students can focus on final exams in other classes. Distribute a movie to each student with video editing software for editing some of the movies down to 20 minute synopses. Spend some time teaching students how to use the software.

Week 7: Perfect Capitalism as Utopia? And another movie

Day #1: Instructor lecture on Market Failures such as Monopoly, Common Property, Public Goods, and Externalities. These are serious criticisms of pure capitalism that have relevance to many ideas as to the cause of various representations of distopia. Have a discussion about ideally eliminating market failures as a means of achieving a capitalist utopia. Discuss the ideas of Utopia as manifested by the community of Gaviotas. What problems materialized for this real world attempt to create a Utopia. What were the motivations of the people of Gaviotas to try to create this community? Are they relevant today? Introduce and motivate the movie: The Corporation. Discuss how Gaviotas is a community built in opposition to corporate impacts on humanity.

Movie Day #2 (The Corporation): The film is an award winning documentary that takes a scathing look at the entity we call the corporation and compares its behavior to a socio-path. Have a wide open discussion on impacts of capitalism, corporations, and globalization on the not-too-distant future. Assess student’s feelings about the relative correctness of the ideas of 1) Corporate Utopia, and 2) Corporate Distopia.

Week 8: Ecocide and Ecological Collapse and another movie

Day #1: Discuss various hypothesized threats of ecological collapse ranging from ideas in Jared Diamond’s book ‘Collapse: How societies choose to either succeed or fail’ to Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Threats to be discussed will include climate change, frankenfoods (Genetically Modified Organisms), loss of biodiversity, loss of soil and water, deforestation, etc. Explain how difficult it was to find a ecological collapse distopia movie. Motivate and introduce the movie: Koyannisqatsi (Hopi word for ‘Life out of balance’).

Day #2 (Koyannisqatsi): Koyannisqatsi is not a movie about ecological collapse per se; however, it is a striking juxtaposition of human activities and natural phenomena. If time allows we will also show clips from the film Baraka.

Week 9: The Chop Shop: Presentation of edited movie synopses by students

Day #1 & #2: During week 6 each student chose a movie to edit down from this list:

Soylent Green The Quiet Earth The Omega Man

The Andromeda Strain Silent Running Logan’s Run

2001: A space odyssey On the beach Westworld

Blade Runner A boy and his dog Road Warrior

Terminator Waterworld The Day After Tomorrow

Solaris A clockwork orange Planet of the Apes

Kurosawa’s Dreams Gattaca Twelve Monkeys

Brazil Metropolis The Matrix

Rollerball Minority Report Vanilla Sky

Wings of Desire Lost Horizon The day the earth stood still

Star Trek Movies It’s a wonderful Life

We will watch and discuss the synopses of these movies that were prepared by the students.

Week 10: Students immediate and long term plans and prospects, Course evaluation

Day #1: Open discussion focused on the ideas students have about the utopia they might like to see or create. Find out what students realistic ideas of the future are. Are they optimistic or pessimistic? Do a little career exploration with them – what are they majoring in at DU and what do they plan to do with their degrees?

Day #2 (No Movie Week 10): Wrap up the course. Conduct formal and informal evaluations of the course with the students. What worked? What didn’t work? Were the readings too long? Did we watch too many movies? Were the writing assignments fun?

1. If you have a disability/medical issue protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and need to request accommodations, please make an appointment with the Disability Services Program (DSP); 303.871.2372/ 2278/ 7432; located on the 4^th floor of Ruffatto Hall; 1999 E. Evans Ave. Information is also available on line at http://www.du.edu/disability/dsp. See the Handbook for Students with Disabilities.

2. Any student who feels s/he may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact me privately to discuss your specific needs. Please contact the Disability Services Program located on the 4^th floor of Ruffatto Hall; 1999 E. Evans Ave., to coordinate reasonable accommodations for students with documented disabilities/medical issues. 303.871. / 2278 / 7432/ 2455. Information is also available on line at http://www.du.edu/disability/dsp; see the Handbook for Students with Disabilities.

 3. If you qualify for academic accommodations because of a disability or medical issue please submit a Faculty Letter to me from Disability Services Program (DSP) in a timely manner so that your needs may be addressed. Disability Services determines accommodations based on documented disabilities/medical issues. DSP  is located on the 4^th floor of Ruffatto Hall, 1999 E. Evans Ave.;  303.871. 2372/ 2278 / 7432. Information is also available on line at http://www.du.edu/disability/dsp; see the Handbook for Students with Disabilities.