Literary Utopia / Dystopia

Spring 2021

Emma Depledge

Mme Honor Jackson, UNINE

Prof. Emma Depledge, UNINE

Prof. Martin Dzelzainis, University of Leicester, UK

This workshop will explore utopian and dystopian writing as a genre across all literary periods. It will invite students to consider literary utopia / dystopia, its origins, spaces of resistance, utopia and rhetoric, and utopia as a political reality vs utopia as political satire. Students will also also have the opportunity to explore the role academia plays in today's world and the extent to which the Humanities interact with utopian and dystopian concepts. The workshop will consist of a lecture by the invited speaker, a 2hr workshop based on short extracts from Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines and others, and (optional 20-minute) student presentations on either the topic of utopia / dystopia, or else on their thesis project more generally. At the start of the workshop, all students will be invited to give short (5 minute) presentations in which they identify the ways in which the texts they work on relate to utopian / dystopian ideas of the period in and for which their primary texts were produced. The workshop will explore all literary periods, but it will do so with particular emphasis on the Restoration and early eighteenth century Proposed speaker: Professor Martin Dzelzainis, University of Leicester, UK Professor Dzelzainis is an expert in seventeenth-century literature and political thought. He has published widely on seventeenth-century religious politics, moral values and dissent and on both canonical writers, like Andrew Marvell, John Milton and T.S. Eliot, as well as on lesser-known writers, such as Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon.

Neuchâtel

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