2017-2018 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
2017-2018 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 380 - Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Speculations


This advanced seminar conducts cultural and historical examinations of speculative fiction and theory produced after 1945 in response to prevailing societal anxieties of the times. Topics and subgenres examined include alternate history and reality; plague and apocalypse; technology, artificial intelligence, and artificial life; utopia, anti-utopia, and dystopia; and futurity, afro- and ethnofuturism, and posthumanity. Our investigations will also draw on genre theories to explore the shifting conventions of literary, science, and slipstream fictions, and assess the rhetorical effects of the genre-bending exercises of their authors. Deep engagements with the writings of Rene Girard, N. Katherine Hayles, Achille Mbembe, Lauren Berlant, Fredric Jameson, Tzvetan Todorov, Priscilla Wald and many other theorists will frame our critical examinations.

Satisfies the Genre (B-2) or Period (C-3) requirement for undergraduate English majors.

 

 

Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically