Home Page for John Lenz's First Year Seminar, Spring 2003

Dep't of Classics, Drew University, Madison, NJ

  (previously offered in Fall 1996 and Spring 2002, and in the Graduate School in Fall 1997)

UTOPIAS:  other mega-sites

• Utopia on the Internet:  a listing of Web sites about Utopias
• Utopia:  The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York Public Library exhibit)
• Utopia links from the above NYPL exhibit:  many resources, texts, images ...
• Utopia:  list of works with links
• Utopia:  Lehman Scholars' Seminar:  syllabus with good links
• some utopian links
• Utopias and Dystopias:  exhibit at National Library of Canada
• Utopia:  General Bibliography
• The Society for Utopian Studies

Internet Resources for the Liberal Arts and the Humanities

UTOPIAS IN FICTION AND HISTORY, ARRANGED CHRONOLOGICALLY

The Garden of Eden: Genesis 1-3;
Paradise: Revelation 17-22.21 (end);
Golden Age (Greek): Hesiod, Works and Days (selection);
Golden Age (Roman): Ovid: in the Norton edition of More, pp. 89-90.

Plato's Republic, The Classic Political Utopia:

• Plato's Republic (4th century BC; B. Jowett's 19th-century trans.).
• another copy of Plato's Republic (trans. Jowett)
• Plato's Works in English

The First "Utopia":  THOMAS MORE (1478-1535), Utopia (1516)

• Thomas More Home Page(isn't he on the ball)
• Read Utopia (1516; in an English translation, copyright 1901)
• Utopia:  another e-text
• Utopia as More wrote it: in Latin
• Essays on More'sUtopia

 Campanella, "City of the Sun" (1602, pub. 1623)

 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

 The First Futurist Utopia (before sci-fi):   Mercier, Louis-Sébastian (1740-1814):

• a home page of sorts;
• The Painter of Mores: The rise of the sociological imaginary in the writings of Honoré de Balzac and Louis-Sébastien Mercier by Lance T. Peterson (an abstract of diss.);
• The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One (1770) (excerpts translated by Robert Darnton in The Forbidden Bestsellers of Prerevolutionary France).

Robert Owen (1771-1858): (i) Information & List of Works; (ii) Text of A New View of Society, Or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice(1813-1816)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Shakers and American Utopian Communities by Jessica Cook (Worcester Polytechnic Institute; thesis was online)

AMERICA IN NEED OF A UTOPIA (the New World has become an Old World)

Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward
Texts (each with convenient chapter-by-chapter table of contents, and completely searchable):
    Looking Backward:  2000-1887(1888)
   Looking Backward:  2000-1887 (1888)
    Looking Backward:  2000-1887 (1888) (same as previous copy)
Edward Bellamy:  A Nineteenth Century Visionary:   page with texts, essays, links
Iceberg: Utopia, Dystopia, and Myopia in the Late-19th Century [America] by Jorn Munkner:   online essay, somewhat idiosyncratic

William Morris,News from Nowhere, or, an Epoch of Rest (1890)
   William Morris Home Page on the Victorian Web
   William Morris and His Circle (exhibit)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935): Herland (1915)

Garden Cities

La-La Land:   Mark Girouard, Cities and People, pp. 348-352 (from New Jerusalem to the Garden City) and pp. 362-375 (Los Angeles, a new garden of Eden?).

John Lennon, "Imagine" (song-lyrics, 1971)

Get Your Utopia Out of My Face!   Dystopias or Anti-Utopias

Zamyatin's We

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (novel of 1986 and film based on it, written by Harold Pinter)

• Study Guide to Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale by Paul Brians, Washington State University
• Margaret Atwood WWW Resources by Brittney Goodman--includes several sites about this work
• official Margaret Atwood Information Site

The Future in Cyberspace: "someday we're all going to ..."
  Readings on, and about, the World Wide Web and Cyberculture:

• Being Digital by N. Negroponte (Cyberdock version)
• City of Bits by William J. Mitchell
• The Virtual Communityby Howard Rheingold

Associate Professor, Department of Classics,University, Madison, NJ  07940  USA