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the USSR after Gorbachev: a boom of pornography

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This research paper focuses on Orwell's 1984. There are many topics from which you can choose below, but you are welcomed to come up with your own topic. I ask only that the topic be directly related to Orwell and/or the novel. This is crucial. Do not forget that your paper, while being research, must also be thesis driven. This means that you need to have a clear argument and support.

Examples of topics related to 1984:

1. Mind Control

advertising as mind control, e.g., military recruitment advertisements, tobacco, etc.

television as propaganda spreading official information leading to mind control

alcohol/substances as mind control

cults of personality and other religious cults

Sexual Repression, Sexism, and Pornography as Mind Control

Orwell as a (non-)sexist author

Julia and sexuality

notice the effects of 'free speech' and 'free press' in the USSR after Gorbachev: a boom of pornography

Censorship

"This will not be another Viet Nam": how the military handled the media in the Gulf wars

If you can't beat 'em, embed 'em: co-opting the media during war

"All the news that we see fit to print": corporate ownership of the US media

fake news

Propaganda

how journalism and the media failed this country after 9/11 and during the lead-up to war

fear and loathing: how to coerce people with fear, prejudice, and blatant nationalism, manipulating them to do what you want

the Bush administration's justifications for invading Iraq

implied emergencies to force policy changes

Invasion of Privacy and/or Prior Restraint

the loss of civil liberties during "war," i.e., the Patriot Act

1984 as a warning about how governments can use fear to erode civil liberties

Historical Parallels

the loss of civil liberties during "war," i.e., the Patriot Act

Oceania and the USSR

Oceania and Nazi Germany

Big Brother as Hitler or Stalin or the cult figure of your choosing

the Cold War

the Military-Industrial Complex: what President Eisenhower warned us about more than 50 years ago has come true about why we fight, or 'how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.'

1984 as a warning about how democracies become authoritarian states run by elites

Requirements:

1. The minimum length of the text is 2500 words, not including any front or end matter (such as headers, title pages, outlines, table of contents, notes, bibliographies, or appendices).

2. The paper must employ a minimum of six sources, both primary and secondary, both book and periodical, and the sources must be scholarly/professional sources.

3. The paper must incorporate quotes (Links to an external site.)/paraphrased materials (Links to an external site.) from both 1984 and your abstracted sources.

4. The paper must conform to the MLA style sheet/format.

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Deandric and Dgerico Sarmiento Stakeholders Assignment

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Deandric and Dgerico Sarmiento Stakeholders Assignment

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Jeanna Mae Vitug and Alejandro Gregorio Stakeholders Assignment

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Christian Cox & Kassandra Peel - Stakeholders Assignment

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Literary Criticism, Moral Criticism and Dramatic

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Intro to Literary Theory, Moral Criticism and Dramatic Construction Notes

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Intro to Literary Theory, Moral Criticism, and Dramatic Construction Notes

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Literary Criticism, Moral Criticism and Dramatic Construction Notes

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Literary Criticism, Moral Criticism and Dramatic Construction Notes

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Literary_Moral Criticism + Dramatic Construction (2)

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Moral criticism and dramatic construction

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.

Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.

Moral Criticism and Dramatic Construction (~360 BC-present)
Summary:
This resource will help you begin the process of understanding literary theory and schools of criticism and how they are used in the academy.

Plato

In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism in the West. The dialogue between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek Republic. Richter provides a nice summary of this point: "...poets may stay as servants of the state if they teach piety and virtue, but the pleasures of art are condemned as inherently corrupting to citizens..." (19).

One reason Plato included these ideas in his Socratic dialog is because he believed that art was a mediocre reproduction of nature: "...what artists do...is hold the mirror up to nature: They copy the appearances of men, animals, and objects in the physical world...and the intelligence that went into its creation need involve nothing more than conjecture" (Richter 19). So in short, if art does not teach morality and ethics, then it is damaging to its audience, and for Plato this damaged his Republic.

Given this controversial approach to art, it's easy to see why Plato's position has an impact on literature and literary criticism even today (though scholars who critique work based on whether or not the story teaches a moral are few - virtue may have an impact on children's literature, however).

Aristotle

In Poetics, Aristotle breaks with his teacher (Plato) in the consideration of art. Aristotle considers poetry (and rhetoric), a productive science, whereas he thought logic and physics to be theoretical sciences, and ethics and politics practical sciences (Richter 38). Because Aristotle saw poetry and drama as means to an end (for example, an audience's enjoyment) he established some basic guidelines for authors to follow to achieve certain objectives.

To help authors achieve their objectives, Aristotle developed elements of organization and methods for writing effective poetry and drama known as the principles of dramatic construction (Richter 39). Aristotle believed that elements like "...language, rhythm, and harmony..." as well as "...plot, character, thought, diction, song, and spectacle..." influence the audience's katharsis (pity and fear) or satisfaction with the work (Richter 39). And so here we see one of the earliest attempts to explain what makes an effective or ineffective work of literature.

Like Plato, Aristotle's views on art heavily influence Western thought. The debate between Platonists and Aristotelians continued "...in the Neoplatonists of the second century AD, the Cambridge Platonists of the latter seventeenth century, and the idealists of the romantic movement" (Richter 17). Even today, the debate continues, and this debate is no more evident than in some of the discussions between adherents to the schools of criticism contained in this resource.

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Moral Criticism, Dramatic Construction // Purdue Writing Lab

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This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice. Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission.

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Notes on intro to literary theory:

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Trayvon Hendricks Thesis Statement Notes 

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Trayvon Hendricks Thesis Statement Notes 

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Alejandro Gregorio - Thesis Statement Notes

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Alejandro Gregorio - Thesis Statement Notes

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Krisha Mae Lee - Genre Notes

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Reading the audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Reading the Audience

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Deandric Sarmiento - Reading the Audience

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Deandric Sarmiento - Reading the Audience

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Dgerico Sarmiento - Reading the Audience

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Dgerico Sarmiento - Reading the Audience

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Aaron M. - Reading the Audience

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Alejandro G - Reading the Audience Assignment

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Alejandro G - Reading the Audience Assignment

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Definition of Genre

Genre means a type of art, literature, or music characterized by a specific form, content, and style. For example, literature has four main genres: poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction. All of these genres have particular features and functions that distinguish them from one another. Hence, it is necessary on the part of readers to know which category of genre they are reading in order to understand the message it conveys, as they may have certain expectations prior to the reading concerned.

Types of Genre

There are five types of genres in literature, which include:

Poetry

Poetry is the first major literary genre. All types of poetry share specific characteristics. In fact, poetry is a form of text that follows a meter and rhythm, with each line and syllable. It is further subdivided into different genres, such an epic poem, narrative, romantic, dramatic, and lyric. Dramatic poetry includes melodrama, tragedy, and comedy, while other poems includes ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad, song, and epic.

Popular examples of epic poems include Paradise Lost, by John Milton, The Iliad and The Odyssey, by Homer. Examples of romantic poems include Red Red Rose, by Robert Burns. All these poetic forms share specific features, such as they do not follow paragraphs or sentences; they use stanzas and lines instead. Some forms follow very strict rules of length, and number of stanzas and lines, such as villanelle, sonnet, and haiku. Others may be free-form, like Feelings, Now, by Katherine Foreman, which is devoid of any regular meter and rhyme scheme. Besides that, often poetry uses figurative language, such as metaphor, simile, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, and alliteration to create heightened effect.

Drama

Drama is a form of text that is performed in front of an audience. It is also called a play. Its written text contains dialogues, and stage directions. This genre has further categories such as comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy. William Shakespeare is known as the father of English drama. His well-known plays include Taming of the Shrew, Romeo & Juliet, and Hamlet. Greek playwrights were the pioneers in this field, such as Sophocles' masterpiece Oedipus Rex, and Antigone, while modern dramas include Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller.

Prose

This type of written text is different from poetry in that it has complete sentences organized into paragraphs. Unlike poetry, prose focuses on characters and plot, rather than focusing on sounds. It includes short stories and novels, while fiction and non-fiction are its sub genres. Prose is further categorized into essays, speeches, sermons, and interpretations.

Fiction

Fiction has three categories that are, realistic, non-realistic, and semi-fiction. Usually, fiction work is not real and therefore, authors can use complex figurative language to touch readers' imaginations. Unlike poetry, it is more structured, follows proper grammatical pattern, and correct mechanics. A fictional work may incorporate fantastical and imaginary ideas from everyday life. It comprises some important elements such as plot, exposition, foreshadowing, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Popular examples of literary fiction include, James Joyce's novel A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Non-Fiction

Non-fiction is a vast category that also has sub-genres; it could be creative like a personal essay, or factual, like a scientific paper. It may also use figurative language, however, not unlike poetry, or fiction has. Sometimes, non-fiction may tell a story, like an autobiography, or sometimes it may convey information to readers.

Other examples of non-fiction include biographies, diaries, memoirs, journals, fantasies, mysteries, and romances. A popular example of non-fiction genre is Michael Pollan's highly celebrated book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which is an account of the eating habits of Americans.

Function of Genre

Different genres have different roles. For example, fiction and dramatic genres help students and writers learn and improve their communication skills. A poetic genre, on the other hand, enhances imaginative and emotional power of the readers. Non-fictional texts and essays help readers develop analytical and persuasive capabilities. However, the major function of genre is to establish a code of behavior between the writers and audience, and keep the readers informed about the topics discussed or the themes presented.

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Genre - Examples and Definition of Genre

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Genre means a type of art, literature, or music characterized by a specific form, content, and style. For example, literature has four main genres: poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fiction. All of these genres have particular features and functions that distinguish them from one another.

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Thomas More's , a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a "conspiracy of the rich". Such men, the book announces, are "greedy, unscrupulous and useless". There are a great number of noblemen, More complains, who live like drones on the labour of others. Tenants are evicted so that "one insatiable glutton and accursed plague of his native land" may consolidate his fields. Monarchs, he argues, would do well to swear at their inauguration never to have more than 1,000lbs of gold in their coffers. Perhaps this is one reason why Utopia is not bedside reading in Buckingham Palace. Instead of being worshipped, gold and silver should, he suggests, be used to make chamber pots. War is fit only for beasts, and standing armies should be disbanded. Labour should be reduced to a minimum, though the TUC might balk at the suggestion that workers would use some of their leisure time to attend public lectures before daybreak.

Not all More's proposals would delight the heart of Jeremy Corbyn. The perfection of his utopia is not tarnished in his view by the fact that it contains slaves. On certain festive days wives would fall down at their husbands' feet, confessing that they have performed some domestic duty negligently. Adultery would be punished by the strictest form of slavery. One should recall that More, far from being the liberal-cum-existentialist portrayed in Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, showed not the slightest compunction in torturing and executing heretics. In choosing one's mate, men should be allowed to see their prospective wives naked, since who wants goods that aren't on show? Feminists, however, should note that women would enjoy the same prerogative. Brothels would be abolished, but so would alehouses. There would be no lawyers (a generous-hearted proposal, since More was one himself), but no tolerance for those who waste time, either.

More's book, in some ways a work of early science fiction, gave rise to a whole new genre of writing. Judging from that literature, there are really two kinds of utopia. There are carnivalesque societies in which, instead of working, everyone will drink, feast and copulate from dawn to dusk. In one such 18th-century fantasy, men and women bereft of all body hair leap naked into fountains, while the progressively minded narrator watches on. Whether his pleasure is entirely theoretical remains unclear.

More's fantasy is a high-minded, puritanical place, one likely to appeal to the stereotypical Hampstead vegetarian

There are also more austere utopias, in which everything is odourless and antiseptic, intolerably streamlined and sensible. In these meticulously planned countries of the mind, the natives tend to jaw on for hours about the efficiency of their sanitary arrangements or the ingenuity of their electoral system. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is in some ways an exercise of this kind, as Crusoe, marooned on a desert island, potters about, chopping wood and staking out his enclosure as if he were in the home counties. It is reassuring to see him practising a very English rationality in such exotically unfamiliar circumstances. More's fantasy is an odd mixture of both visions, rational and libidinal. On the one hand, his ideal society is a high-minded, fairly puritanical place, one likely to appeal to the stereotypical Hampstead vegetarian; on the other hand, its inhabitants are genial, laid-back and agreeably disinclined to do much work.

Alternative universes are really devices for embarrassing the present, as imaginary cultures are used to estrange and unsettle our own. As such, they have been largely the product of the left. The finest of all such works in Britain is the Marxist William Morris's News from Nowhere, one of the very few utopian visions to offer a detailed account of how the political transformation actually came about. Meanwhile, a hard-nosed anti-utopian right has scoffed at the unreality of such proposals, rather like the Daily Mail on the new Labour leader. The word "utopia" means "nowhere", but it isn't clear whether this is because the place could exist but happens not to, or whether it is nowhere in much the same sense that a humble Richard Dawkins or a coy Chris Evans is.

A print from an 1860s edition of Gulliver's Travels. Photograph: Alamy

Swift's Gulliver's Travels is one such rightwing polemic. Tories like Swift, who regard human beings as feeble and corrupt, fear that nothing but chaos and confusion can result from the grandiose schemes of the progressivists. If men and women are encouraged to hope unrealistically, they can only end up damaged and disenchanted. Gulliver himself is finally driven mad, seduced by an impossible ideal. In this satire of idle dreaming, alien creatures from distant lands are shown to be depressingly like ourselves. The natives of Lilliput are petty, vicious, quarrelsome and sectarian. When the hero finally encounters a race of noble-minded creatures, they turn out to be horses.

To portray the future in the language of the present may well be to betray it. A truly radical change would defeat the categories we currently have to hand. If we can speak of the future at all, it follows that we are still tied to some extent to the present. This is one reason why Marx, who began his career in contention with the middle-class utopianists, steadfastly refused to engage in future-talk. The most a revolutionary could do was to describe the conditions under which a different sort of future might be possible. To stipulate exactly what it might look like was to try to programme freedom. If Marx was a prophet, it was not because he sought to foresee the future. Prophets - Old Testament ones, at least - aren't clairvoyants. Rather than gaze into the future, they warn you that unless you feed the hungry and welcome the immigrant, there isn't going to be one. Or if there is, it will be deeply unpleasant. The real soothsayers are those hired by the big corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure their masters that their profits are safe for another 30 years. We live in a world that seeks to extend its sovereignty even over what doesn't yet exist.

Marx nowhere suggests that post-capitalist societies would be free of psychopaths, free-loaders or Piers Morgan-types

Radicals thus find themselves under fire from opposite directions. If they refuse to debate what kind of cultural policies might flourish under socialism, for example, they are being shifty; if they hand you a thick bunch of documents on the question, they are guilty of blue-printing. Perhaps it is impossible to draw a line between being too agnostic about the future and being too assured about it. The Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin reminds us that the ancient Jews were forbidden to make icons of what was to come, rather as they were forbidden to fashion graven images of Yahweh. The two prohibitions are closely related, since for the Hebrew scriptures, Yahweh is the God of the future, whose kingdom of justice and friendship is still to come. Besides, the only image of God for Judaism is human flesh and blood. For Benjamin, seeking to portray the future is a kind of fetishism. Instead, we are driven backwards into this unexplored territory with our eyes fixed steadily on the injustice and exploitation of the past. Knowing exactly where we are going is the surest way of not getting there. In any case, the energies we invest in envisaging a better world might consume the energies we need to create it.

Marx had no interest in human perfection. There is nothing in his work to suggest that post-capitalist societies would be magically free of predators, psychopaths, free-loaders, Piers Morgan-types or people who stow their luggage on aircraft with surreal slowness, indifferent to the fact that there are 50 people queuing behind them. The idea that history is moving ever onwards and upwards is an invention of the middle-class Enlightenment, not of the left.

Thomas More's Utopia (1518). Photograph: The Granger Collection, New York

Marx, however, was aware that there are two kinds of starry-eyed idealist. There are those like the French 19th-century thinker Charles Fourier, who looked forward to a future in which the sea would turn into lemonade, and whose ideal social unit consisted of exactly 1,620 people. Then there is the other bunch of wild-eyed idealists who hold that the future will be pretty much like the present. Those with their heads truly in the clouds are the hard-headed pragmatists who seem to assume that Mars bars and the International Monetary Fund will still be with us in 500 year's time. Our system is run by a set of dreamers who call themselves realists. To expect the future to be different is not of course to maintain that it will be better. It might be a great deal worse. The point is that history is malleable enough for us to choose. No sooner had the political theorists of the 1990s proclaimed that history was at an end than two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center, and a whole new historical narrative began to unfold. History may not have been improved by this development, but it certainly didn't stand still.

All true utopianists do themselves out of a job. The only place where there is no need for utopian thought is in utopia, a country that Oscar Wilde considered every genuine map of the world should contain. There will be no need for feminists once patriarchy and sexism are dim memories of a benighted past. Until then, critics of the present must remain properly otherworldly, despite the taunts of their political opponents. They must refuse the transparent falsehood that the world we see around us is the best we can muster. Bad forms of utopianism simply tack a fantasy on to actuality, making an idol out of the future. Conservatives, by contrast, are in danger of consecrating the present. The best kind of utopian thought rejects both of these cases. Instead, it holds present and future in tension by pointing to those forces active in the present that might lead beyond it.

As a man of his time, Thomas More did not think in such terms. He did not share the modern conception of history as constant change, and looking back at his great treatise one is tempted to suggest that in some ways he was right not to do so. For one of Utopia 's most striking aspects is its contemporaneity - the way in which the greedy, unscrupulous and useless are just as much in evidence now as in 1516. The conspiracy of the rich has lasted an extraordinarily long time.

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Utopias, past and present: why Thomas More remains astonishingly radical

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What is a perfect society, and what's the best kind of utopianism? Terry Eagleton looks at future thinking and concludes that our system is run by dreamers who call themselves realists

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Michael Robertson's " The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy " (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson's evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren't likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind. All four wrote books and imagined ideal societies with far more of an effect on their time than we now remember. The touching parts flow from the quixotic and earnest imaginations of his heroes and heroine: the pundit Edward Bellamy, the designer William Morris, the pioneering gay writer Edward Carpenter, and the feminist social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. His utopians showed enormous courage in imagining and, to one degree or another, trying to create new worlds against the grain of the one they had inherited. They made blueprints of a better place, detailed right down to the wallpaper, and a pleasing aura of pious intent rises from these pages.

The comedy, which is inadvertent, springs from Robertson's absence of common sense about these utopian projects, pious intent being very different from pragmatic achievement. Hugely sympathetic to his subjects, he discovers again and again as he inspects their projects that, for all the commendable bits that anticipate exactly the kinds of thing we like now, there are disagreeable bits right alongside, of exactly the kinds that we don't like now. The utopian feminists are also eugenicists and anti-Semites; the men who dream of a perfect world where same-sex attraction is privileged also unconsciously mimic the hierarchy of patriarchy, putting effeminate or cross-dressing "Uranians" at the bottom of their ladder. The socialists are also sexists, and the far-seeing anarchists are also muddle-headed, mixed-up mystics.

The sensible lesson one might draw from this is that the human condition is one in which the distribution of bad and good is forever in flux, and so any blueprint of perfection is doomed to failure. Instead, Robertson assumes that if we can just add to the utopian visions of 1918 the progressive pieties of 2018-if we reform their gender essentialism and their implicit hierarchism and several other nasty isms-then we will at last arrive at the right utopia. This gives his book something of the exhausted cheerfulness of a father on a nine-hour car trip. "We're almost there!" he keeps saying, as the kids in the back seat fret, and peer at license plates.

As every student was once taught, the idea of utopia, or at least the name for it, originated with Thomas More, the man for all seasons, who wrote the first one down in 1516. "Utopia" means "no place" in Greek, and so a sly element of rueful self-acknowledgment resides within the idea, with the auto-negation of a Magritte drawing. More's original Utopia is, like many that followed it, a charming mixture of intelligent social criticism and bizarre sexual aspiration, none of it meant, one feels, to be taken altogether seriously. In More, the two ironies that govern nineteenth-century utopian thinking are already present: artisanal craft is rated over mental work by an intellectual author, and sexual egalitarianism is proposed by an imagination not entirely at ease with it. In More's island society, everyone has to weave or sew or do carpentry, and partner-switching through divorce is permitted. There's no private property and no locks on the houses, but there are slaves-kept in gold chains, to teach children to despise the substance. Women have to confess their sins to their husbands, but the husbands must obey their wives. Though his motives in writing the book are still puzzling to scholars (was More mocking Catholic rules or merely toying with them?), he created a template for later utopias, which were always marked by those two tenacious ironies: thinking people are told by a thinking person to stop thinking, and changing the world is imagined to depend on changing who we sleep with and how. (By contrast, the French tradition, as in the ideal worlds of Fourier and Comte, has an edge of instruction; they really mean it, in a way that More and the writers Robertson inspects don't quite.)

Edward Bellamy is the first of Robertson's nineteenth-century utopians. When his blandly written book " Looking Backward" appeared, in 1888, it created a now puzzling craze both in his native America and in England. Bellamy's hero falls asleep in 1887-bizarrely, he's been entombed in a specially built cell designed to help cure his insomnia-and wakes up in 2000. Instead of immediately rushing off to see "Mission: Impossible 2," though, he enters a world of communistic order. As Robertson rightly sees, Bellamy offers a nightmarish vision of a hyper-regimented society in which everyone works for the government and retires at forty-five, and where the most fun you can have is to go shopping by picking out goods from a catalogue, ordering them from big depots via pneumatic tube, and then having them delivered at home. Where Wells's " The Time Machine," which came out not long after, gave us pale Eloi and proletarian Morlocks, Bellamy was chiefly prescient about Amazon Prime.

What in the world made "Looking Backward" appealing not only to men of letters like William Dean Howells and Mark Twain but to so many farmers and workers that Bellamy was eventually made a delegate of a populist party? Part of the appeal, Robertson persuasively argues, had something to do with post-Civil War nostalgia for the purity of wartime regimentation. In a time of confused plutocracy, everyone wanted a variant of what William James later called "the moral equivalent of war."

But pursuing the moral equivalent of war always gives you the warrior's idea of morality. As Bellamy's book progresses, power, brutality, and the capacity to dominate become all that matters. Rules are made and harshly enforced. Robertson chides Bellamy for being inconsistently feminist, which is true, but what is chilling in Bellamy is how much of the totalitarian imagination is already in place in his work, and how alluring it can seem. It's the same phenomenon that we find in the Athenian intellectual's idealization of Sparta: intellectuals always dream of a closed society even though they themselves can exist only in an open one.

Bellamy's book, hard to read now, had a falling-domino effect on Robertson's next and more interesting utopian, William Morris; "Looking Backward" helped inspire Morris's " News from Nowhere," from 1890. Though written as a kind of corrective to Bellamy, as the Gospel of Matthew is a Jewish corrective to the Gentile-welcoming Gospel of Mark, "News from Nowhere" signals a more radical break with nineteenth-century orthodoxy than Bellamy could achieve. Heroes and heroines of the time are always falling asleep and waking up in some illustrative elsewhere-the pattern holds true for everyone from Alice to Twain's Connecticut Yankee-and Morris's hero wakes up in a perfect socialist-agrarian England, restored to a pastoral purity that somehow doesn't include dawn-to-dusk labor in the fields or the constant threat of famine.

Yet the improbability of the vision shouldn't diminish the originality of the take. Marxist accounts are concerned with the distribution of the goods that work makes; the utopian remonstrance is concerned with the nature of work itself. For Morris, industrial, agricultural, and even clerical work amount to forms of regimentation no different from slavery, a series of insults to the human spirit. The evil is industrialized labor itself-an entire existence spent like a galley slave pulling an oar. Owning your own oar doesn't change the inhumanity of a life given over to rowing in the dark.

Morris's novel became the central literary testament of the Arts and Crafts movement, which had sprung out of the more narrowly easel-bound Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. But then, Morris's desire to reject all things Victorian and be "intensely medieval" is what makes him so quintessentially Victorian. His famously hand-wrought houses, Kelmscott Manor and the Red House, depended on the broader fabric of Victorian prosperity to support their own secession from it. Authoritarians come in many kinds-theistic and military and bully-worshipping-but Morris was an unusual and modern thing, an aesthetic authoritarian. He believed that ugliness was as much of an enemy to the human spirit as poverty. Typically, the aesthetic authoritarian likes spartan design: Doric columns and militarized courtyards. But Morris had "feminine" taste; he wanted social justice in the form of flowered wallpaper.

The narrative originality in "News from Nowhere" lies in Morris's inserting a love story into the moralizing time traveller's romance: the hero has a virtuous socialist-feminist heroine, Ellen, to pursue. Yet Morris drains the love story of all vitality. The novel priggishly assures us that storms in love are all the result of private-property relations. "I know that there used to be such lunatic affairs as divorce courts," an informant from the future society tells our narrator. "But just consider; all the cases that came into them were matters of property quarrels: and I think, dear guest . . . that though you do come from another planet, you can see from the mere outside look of our world that quarrels about private property could not go on amongst us in our days."

In fact, Morris's own love life suggests that breakups actually have a lot to do with emotion. Rather against the run of his own idealizing, he admits that sexual jealousy and erotic rage will still rule in utopia: two adultery-related murders take place in the book. It's as if Morris couldn't credibly imagine a world without passion. So we come back to the actual story that inspired it-the story of Morris's love for the working-class beauty Jane Burden and her eventual troubled affair with his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti-to find ourselves in a recognizably human world where new desire and old allegiance and frustrated appetite and lovers' empathy devolve into their usual muddle.

The last two of Robertson's four utopians are chosen, one feels, not because of their historical impact but because of their alignment with contemporary preoccupations. Edward Carpenter was a wealthy British homosexual who either did or did not have sex with Walt Whitman after making a pilgrimage to meet him in Philadelphia in 1877. Either way, he was inspired by the encounter to write a long utopian poem called " Towards Democracy." A sub-Whitman rhapsody of no particular poetic merit, the work had a smallish effect in its time. It's essentially a catalogue of utopian attitudes, including, yes, the overevaluation of craft and the not very well defined longings for sexual freedom: "Lovers of all handicrafts and of labors in the open air, confessed passionate lovers of your own sex / Arise! / Heroes of the enfranchisement of the body (latest and best gift long concealed from men), Arise!" The poem's habitual conjunction of the carefully qualifying parentheses with the martial invocation is, to say the least, bathetic. But Carpenter did have a distinctive contribution: to imagine same-sex desire as the essential building block of a perfected world.

Robertson worries about how much we ought to read Carpenter's book as a prescient work of gay liberation-indulging the idea that, until we can give a specific singular name to a thing, we have no concept of it. "Homosexuals were nonexistent in British discourse until the 1890's," he writes. But mental categories are not enclosed by a single word, or even by any words at all. People took sexual pleasure from inflicting pain before Sade sacrificed his name to sadism, and others loved enduring it before there was a Sacher-Masoch. "Homosexual" may have given a new pseudoscientific taxonomic category to the language, but it didn't alter the condition of desire. English memoirs before 1890 are filled with men who were attracted to other men and who knew it. In any case, the continuity of desire, across discontinuities of labels, is clear enough. Robertson tells us pleasingly that "Alan Ginsberg constructed a gay lineage connecting himself to Whitman: Ginsberg had slept with Neal Cassady, who had slept with Gavin Arthur, who had slept with Edward Carpenter, who had slept with Walt Whitman."

Carpenter's work did help popularize the term he favored for the homoerotic: "Uranian." (Oscar Wilde, among others, adopted the term and evangelized for it.) Carpenter lived in a country house with his working-class lover, and it became a kind of same-sex Kelmscott, a refuge for members of the Uranian tribe. Oddly, his emphasis throughout-influenced, it seems, by ascetic Eastern religious ideas to which he was exposed-was on the idea that Uranians were less sensual than "mulierasts," or straight men, and that their lack of erotic appetite made them historically responsible for the advance of civilization. A utopia filled with Uranians would have less sex and more art. With no obligation to people the world, they could turn to higher things. Robertson rightly calls this theorizing "courageous and peculiar" and then comes down hard on Carpenter for having constructed a sexual hierarchy in which masculine Uranians were elevated over effeminate ones. (Around the same time, Proust, despite his own orientation, used exactly the same concepts, insisting that self-evident homosexuals, like his characters Jupien the tailor and Charlus, were merely perverse "men-women.")

Robertson pays his final visit to the idealistic imaginings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an American whose vast writings on ideal societies were the catalyst for the feminist utopia " Herland" (1915), which, like Morris's "News from Nowhere," was written under the direct influence of "Looking Backward." In "Herland," three young American men (in a scenario later adapted by " Wonder Woman ") fly a biplane to an Amazonian world. Here all males died out two millennia before, and women have managed to reproduce through a not very well explained process of parthenogenesis. The biplane boys come courting, and eventually each marries a local woman, though their American heteronormative patterns can't help but show. (One sexually assaults his new wife, and the others plead that this is only to be expected.) Although women are on top, the social laws dictate strict eugenic breeding, with sexual pleasure coming second to improving the race. Gilman's matriarchy perpetuates its fair share of inequity and iniquity: blacks are taken to be an inferior race, treated with paternalism. Robertson sighs at having such a good feminist embrace such bad ideas.

Gilman is one of those thinkers whose thoughts are more appealing in their original mixed-up, spontaneous forms than in the more settled forms in which they appear in books. Her letters to her cousin (and, eventually, husband) Houghton, with whom she had an epistolary romance, are hugely charming, contradictory, and more inviting than her finished prose; they reveal her as a kind of early Katharine Hepburn character, tough-minded but touched by self-doubt and its literary indicator, self-deprecating humor. In them, Gilman offers a theory of marriage that anticipates much "sex-positive" postmodern writing on the subject. In her view, we are natural sexual socialists, and marriage betrays this instinct. If we all had sex with the person we loved, instead of the person to whom we are bound by mortgages, the world would improve. By allowing economic relations to pollute sexual relations, we make people miserable: marriage is a social machine designed to turn pleasure into property. Although Gilman's eugenic ideas are dated and unpleasant, this spontaneously erotic side of her imagination still seems prescient, and all the more touching for being hard-earned: she was not a natural sybarite.

Two genuine deficits touch Robertson's account. One is the too facile identification of utopianism with "progressive" causes. Even in a final chapter that brings the history of utopia up to date, only left-wing utopias are recognized. Yet surely at least as many laissez-faire utopias have been imagined as socialist ones. Ayn Rand's is the most famous; Robert Heinlein's is perhaps the most widely read. The reactionary imagination is, if anything, especially inclined to the backward-looking creation of ideal societies. Morris's medieval ideal could readily be turned in a right-leaning direction; G. K. Chesterton's " The Napoleon of Notting Hill," in which a future London returns to fiefdoms from an imaginary Middle Ages, is only the sunniest and most poetic of these reactionary idealizations.

Robertson implicitly assumes, too, that left-wing utopianism is the guiding, pure, or dream form of liberalism. No doubt progressive causes depend on a vision of a better world ("Imagine there's no heaven . . ."), and he quotes Wilde's remark that "all progress is the realization of Utopias." But what distinguishes the radically realistic liberal tradition from the self-frustrating leftist tradition is its disabused attitude toward perfect worlds. Aptly enough, the word "dystopia" was coined by that greatest of all liberals, John Stuart Mill, in an 1868 speech to Parliament during his short career as an M.P. Mill invented the term, in the context of a now obscure debate on Irish tenant rights, to indicate how utopianism turns back on itself. Though Mill used the new word only in passing, it was not separable from the main point of his speech, which was intended to show the perils of any kind of abstract solution to Ireland's problems:

So far from being a set of maxims and rules to be applied without regard to times, places, and circumstances, the function of political economy is to enable us to find the rules which ought to govern any state of circumstances with which we have to deal-circumstances which are never the same in any two cases. I do not know in political economy more than I know in any other art or science, a single practical rule that must be applicable to all cases, and I am sure that no one is at all capable of determining what is the right political economy for any country until he knows its circumstances.

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What Can We Learn from Utopians of the Past?

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Michael Robertson's " The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy " (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson's evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren't likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind.

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Welcome! Here is the syllabus for the class this semester.