Department of English

• Wednesday, August 16, 2017 - 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall 323

V21 Summer Reading Group Series
V21: Victorian Studies for the 21st Century is sponsoring its third annual summer reading group series in 2017, with groups convening in multiple cities.  Topics are "The Political Conscious," "Imperial Forms,” and "Utopia Now!"  The Philadelphia-area group will meet at Penn on Wednesday afternoons in June, July, and August.  All are welcome!  Come for the whole series or for just one session as your summer schedule allows, and please share widely with friends, colleagues, and students who will be in the PA/NJ/DE/NY area this summer.  For PDFs of the readings, contact Emily Steinlight.

Part 3: UTOPIA NOW!
August 16  2-4 PM
Fisher-Bennett 323

Does literature make demands? Quite aside from the utopian genre, what is utopian in the literary as such? What is the difference between utopian projections of other spaces and utopian projections of other times? What does "the spatial turn” mean in Victorian studies? How do the determinants of the present inform the teaching and reading of past utopias? Who's got a plan?

Readings:
William Morris, News from Nowhere
Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, "Something's Missing"
Phil Wegner, Imaginary Communities Intro and chapter 1
Eleanor Courtemanche, "Satire and the Inevitability Effect: The Structure of Utopian Fiction from Looking Backward to Portlandia"