Ever since the earliest days of the European colonization of North America, we’ve been dreaming. One could even say we were dreaming before we arrived, conjuring up fanciful lands to the west from the Irish Tír Na nÓg (the Land of Youth) to the Portuguese Ilha das Sete Cidades (the Island of Seven Cities). In the time since then, our dreams have grown and altered, sprinkled with the day-residue of rural and then of urban life, and shadowed with the nightmares of slavery and genocide. We’ve dreamed futures, too, some of which may even have come to pass, or yet may. The vehicle for our dreaming has been our literature, and in our films – in this class we’ll look at the ways these imagined lives and events have shaped the actual landscape and culture of the “real” world of today.
We’ll begin with The Wizard of Oz, perhaps the quintessential American dream narrative (though it should be pointed out that, in the original books, Oz is a real place – in the sixth Oz book Dorothy moves her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to Oz, and never returns to Kansas again.). We’ll follow it through of its many permutations, from The Wiz to Wicked, and arrive back home to set our sights on the future. We’ll read A Canticle for Liebowitz, one of the most powerful of post-apocalyptic novels, as well as Kurt Vonegut’s Slaughterhouse Five with its grim reflections on human inanity. We’ll next look at fantastical narratives written to highlight the inequities of sexism and theocracy (The Stepford Wives, The Handmaid’s Tale) and racism (Kindred, The Underground Railway). Finally, we’ll revisit the post-apocalyptic future, but in the form of a land that has been blasted backwards into an agrarian near-Utopia, with Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home.
