Utopian Literature
Instructions are attached, with the syllabus for the class. This is a continuation of an assignment you completed for me in the past (Thesis & Annotated Bibliography), which is also attached along with the teacher’s comments on that previous assignment that you can find below.
This is an outline for an essay that is due later on. You could see an example of such an outline in the instructions attached.
Teacher says:
Thank you so much for this; I look forward to reading it! As for your thesis, I think it is a bit vague, but it has a lot of potential. I think the second half of your thesis–the idea that applying utopian ideas to the real world may lead to “catastrophe and ruin.” Some real world applications I can think of are the Paris Commune, Occupy Wall Street, cults such as Jim Jones (I think it was called the Peoples Temple), or applications within dictatorships, such as Lenin and Stalin’s USSR, Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, or another country where a “Cult of Personality” is established (basically, where the ruler is deemed like a god) and where equality was claimed to be established (honestly, you could also look to times like the French Revolution or American Revolution to think about how short they feel from the idea of “equality”). For more concrete historical examples, you could try to search for “commune” or “cult” and “utopia” in the library search to seem what comes up.
I’ll look over the rest of your annotated bibliography in a bit, but those are the suggestions for potential real world examples. If you want to compare them to a book, you can talk about how some real world societies echo what is found in one of the texts, such as how everyone living in common can be found in Utopia or Republic. Let me know if that helps!
