Read Along with Berkeley English

This semester, we'll be reading along with Professor Amanda Jo Goldstein's Literature and the Environment: Ecology and Utopia. We're excited for the three upcoming sessions! Further details on readings and meeting dates are below. As Professor Goldstein's course description tells us, "Since long before Thomas More coined the catching term “Utopia” – meaning “no place” or “not-place” – to name his fiction of a perfect island commonwealth, the literature of nonexistent worlds has been calling every aspect of actually existing societies into question. This course seeks to investigate the rival ways of thinking about “nature” – human and otherwise – that support utopian visions of political community and to explore the longstanding link between utopian fiction and ecological perspectives on this earth. Readings will allow us to explore utopian ecologies as they arise in political and moral philosophy, science fiction and Afrofuturism, Romantic and pastoral poetry, anarchist and communist writing, literature of exploration and colonization, anthropology, environmental history and indigenous science. Rather than dismiss dissenting visions of terrestrial community as naïve, unscientific, or absurd – “utopian” in a derogatory sense – we will follow our authors in querying the scientific and fictional norms that control what passes for “realistic” in a given era, as well as who counts as a bearer of valid knowledge."