Histoire de l'aire britannique

The term “Utopia” comes from Thomas More’s 1516 book whose title means “no-where”. By enhancing its unrealism, utopian literature has claimed to be innocuous. In fact, ever since ancient times, it has served as a vehicle for advancing dissenting ideas and radical proposals. Travel has often been used as a device to escape from the here and now and explore faraway lands, especially islands, or bygone eras. As such it allowed the imaginary projection of ideal societies.

This course aims to provide the students with a definition and typology of utopia as a genre, from its ancient and Renaissance models to its contemporary versions often verging on its nightmarish opposite, dystopia. Through the study of texts in their historical context, the students will explore various recurrent utopian dreams such as social justice, religious peace, scientific progress, gender equality, political freedom, brotherhood and harmony. They will also learn how to write the historical analysis of a text in English.

Session 1:

Contrôle continu Session 1 : Contrôle continu : un commentaire de texte de 2h à mi-parcours (30%), un devoir écrit de 2h en fin de semestre (50%), participation (préparation des textes, fiches de lecture, prise de parole, etc.) (20%).

Contrôle dérogatoire : un devoir écrit de 2h

Session 2 :

1 devoir écrit de 2h

anglais B2/C1-français B2

Three Early Modern Utopias. Thomas More, Utopia (1512). Francis Bacon. New Atlantis (1624). Henry Neville. The Isle of Pines (1668) ed. Susan Bruce, Oxford Classics, 2008 (1996).
Francis Goodwin, The Man in the Moon (1638), ed. William Poole. Broadview, 2009
Gerrard Winstanley, The Complete Works, eds. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein, Oxford University Press, 2009.
James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (1656), Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels into several remote nations of the world (1726), Penguin, 2008.
Daniel Defoe, “Of Captain Misson and His Crew” in A General History of the Pyrates, vol. II (1728), Dover Publications, 2008.
Robert Owen, A New View of Society (1813) and Other Writings, ed. G. Claeys, Penguin, 2007.
William Morris, A Dream of John Ball (1888); News from Nowhere (1889) http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1900), A Modern Utopia (1905), Men Like Gods (1923), The Shape of Things to Come (1933).
Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World (1932), Harper’s Collins, 1989; Island (1962), Penguin, 2005 (3-D cover).
George Orwell, 1984 (1949), Penguin, 2019 (1950).

Secondary sources
Jean Servier, Histoire de l’utopie, Gallimard, Folio, 1967.
Jean-Marie Racault, L’Utopie narrative en France et en Angleterre 1665-1761, Voltaire Foundation, 1991
J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society. A Study of English Utopian Writing 1500-1700, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Gregory Claeys, Lyman Tower Sargent (eds.), The Utopia Reader, New York University Press, 1999.

To go further
Stéphanie Roza, Comment l’utopie est devenue un programme politique : du roman à la Révolution, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2015

A range of sources and illustrations from the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/utopia.html
https://gallica.bnf.fr/essentiels/parcours-pedagogiques/utopie