2019-2020 Academic Catalog 
    
    Mar 29, 2024  
2019-2020 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 280 - Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Transpacific Speculations


This course considers how an abiding interest in the potential of the Asia Pacific region has informed speculative fiction of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on transpacific discourses that frame the martial, ideological, and cultural encounters between North America and Asia(s), we begin by considering how Asia-and Asianness-was imagined and construed in early American fiction and popular culture. We then move to consider works of Asian diasporic literature and film that subvert these depictions and speculate on the environmental and geopolitical viability of an “Asian future.” We will explore a range of issues within this speculative landscape, including (but not limited to) race and racialization, gender and reproductive futurity, contact and contagion, empire and displacement, economic precarity, and environmental catastrophe.

For undergraduate English Majors, this course satisfies the Genre (C-2) or Period (D-3) requirement.

Prerequisites: VE or ENG 20 Introduction to Literary Analysis

Anticipated Terms Offered: Periodically