User:Chen Junyu/Headings/Reading Writing & Research Methodologies/Trim3/notes : utopia & anti-utopia

utopia and anti-utopia envision a world either all imperfections have been cleaned away or a world of the future in which the imperfections of the present have dramatically worsened and reached a kind of appalling fulfillment.

News from nowhere :1890 1984:1949

3.M: a clear instance of a Utopia O: an equally unmistakable anti-utopia these two texts and they authors are as striking in their similarities as in their differences. both M and O were socialists with a hatred of state socialism/nourished an affection for smallness, which would encourage the individual life,and a mistrust of largeness, fearing it would swallow up the individual in the mass. both : deep dissatisfaction with the world in which he found himself.

4. Logical ( history background ) M: an optimistic utopian novel (end of victorian age), intended to show the ideals to which he had dedicated his life might indeed be fulfilled. O: at the end of a half-century of unparalleled bestiality -- WAR I & WAR II -- should produce as his final work an unyieldingly bleak and anti-utopian novel that may be taken as writing off the fulfillments of all ideals. (everything he believed in most deeply -- as an impossibility.)

5. O: In O's pre-socialist days, he tended to be rather snotty about M. about M's teaching and preaching: a daft eccentricity (certainly an aspect of the early socialist movement in England,and elsewhere).

6. Morris follows Ruskin, ????????????????????

7. " In every fat man there is a thin man crying to get free. " O: one of the characteristics of 1984is the physical repulsiveness of the society it depicts. Both: good things(love&sex)happen in the country. they are both in the long-standing English tradition-frequently a conservative tradition-of pointing out the virtues of the country over the city.

they also have their place in the great , seemingly eternal English tradition of Tory Radicalism.

8. both: visionaries (what they envisioned totally differed

9. both: they wrote their books at the moments of comparative disillusionment. M: Commonweal,Bloody Sunday :英国政府和游行平民的冲突

10.utopia fiction has a way of compensating for the disappointments of everyday life. M: spontaneous uprising of the working class, and a victory for them, pessimistic 消极地对待工人的处境，（同o） 11. 2 versions of a post-revolutionary world: m’s and o’s —intersected,with Orwell depicting in a reverse-of-the-coin way the dangers latent in the paternalistic,state semi-socialism that the Labour government had achieved.

12. M: Opinions vary about the value of his poetry after his remarkable first collection. <news>is a summation of M’s thought,its vision represents his hope for England, and for the rest of the world.

13. M: the immediate impulse for him to begin writing it was the publication in 1884 of Edward bELLAMY’S s Looking Backwards, presenting a utopian version of Boston in the year 2000./another book “the evils of a capitalistic society”

14.****** M: “I” is himself. “small is beautiful” “its government and economy based on decentralisation and small units of production.” — until fairly recently, such an approach to modern western society would have seemed hopelessly romantic. if our top-heavy society is not to topple over and do us all in. the move towards 1960s and early 1970s (hippies or flower children is similar to the dress of m;s utopia)

15. M: unhappily,the possible lack of realism in this Nowhere is not so much in the sort of society depicted ,but other basic premise : that humans need not be aggressive. human beings are not sufficiently able to maintain peaceful relations with one another. For M the perversion （反常） of human character brought about by capitalism meant that humans are alienated(被疏远的） from themselves ，from their work，from their environment. “unfortunately there has not been a society yet, no matter what it may call itself — capitalist,communist, or even our own democracy — that has been able to solve the problems of the aggressive manifestations(表现） of human nature.

16. without this reality, M imaged such a delightful utopia for us.

17.there is a price that has to be paid for this idyll,and it would seem to be an absence of a sense of the past. the atmosphere of this new society is non-intellectual,perhaps even anti-intellectual nobody seems to read, or has much interest in doing so,they are leading a healthy,outdoor life.

18. the concept of rural Utopia, the same values that inspired M — the belief in a humane and fully realised life for the individual— but by means of an anti-utopia .

19. both: from the middle class. O: part of his genius was his ability to notice the specifics of class ,a factor which made hime a founder of literary sociology. he helped to bring into heightened consciousness the nuances of the English class system. he is far more a naysayer than Morris.

20. O: He was writing from a far more disillusioned position than Morris.(at the same time M knew the revulsion won’t turn out as one wished. “How men fight and lose the battle,and the thing they fought for comes about. in spite of (尽管）their defeat and, when it comes, turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”

21.O: there had been further years of disillusion. unlike morris, he turned to look on the grim side of things,really from the beginning.

22.O: his temperament predisposed him to see the worst: experience in the Spanish Civil War(M hasn’t)—he knew how a revolution could be betrayed.

23. both: backwards - looking.( O is almost as romantic about early-twentieth-century England as Morris is about the 14th century.) the attitude towards sex and love is in fact rather similar in both books although of course in M’s case it was more unusual for the time— a celebration and belief in animal nature. O: of special concern to historians and to those who read them— his attitude towards the past. and that is in his attitude towards the past. M:In News from Nowhere, an elderly character, described as the grumbler, the grandfather of the heroine, finds Utopia boring and longs for a world in which books are more important. he present the grumbler not unsympathetically — perhaps books are a solace for the imperfections of the world. he seems to feel that anti-intellectuality is bound to be present in a Utopia

24. O: people are fully employed(shameless,disastrous and a total betrayal of the profession.)

25. O: a society that has lost its history is beyond decency. “the past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the party is in full control of all records,and

26. M: to believe more firmly in pleasure,in the joy that ought to be associated with labor. O’s vision was bleaker . aware of the association of the term ”earthly paradise” with Morris. "Perhaps, however, whether desirable or not, it isn't pos- sible. Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, per- haps even the aim of Socialism is not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure."

27. O: The 'earthly paradise' has never been real- ized, but as an idea it never seems to perish, despite the ease with which it can be de- bunked by practical politicians of all colours. Underneath it lies the belief that human nature is fairly decent to start with and is capable of infinite development. This belief has been the main driving force of the So- cialist tradition.... It could be claimed that the Utopians, at present a scattered minor- ity, are the true upholders of the Socialist tradition.

O wrote in 1984 about News from Nowhere “ they do at least look beyond the era of food queues and party squabbles,and remind the Socialist movement of its original, half-forgotten objective of human brotherhood.”