2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Nov 16, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

CRW 213 - Utopias/Dystopias: Writing Resistance and Identity

In her 2014 National Book Award speech, science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society… writers who can remember freedom - realists of a larger reality.” In this class we will strive to be the writers Le Guin called for. Animated by the question “What if?”, speculative fiction interrogates received ideologies and questions the naturalness or inevitability of social structures and systems of power, “reality” as we know it. This course considers how minority groups have used speculative fiction as a vehicle for writing alternative conceptions of history, society, and identity. Ranging from visionary utopias to nightmarish yet strangely familiar dystopias, these stories make space for those relegated to the margins, pointing not only to what can be but to what already is. Science fiction, in its circuitous way, does not predict, so much as describe. This creative writing class will involve weekly writing exercises, discussion of science fiction texts, and workshop, and will culminate in a novelette-length speculative fiction final project. Students also learn how to submit work to literary journals for publication. This course counts towards the Creative Writing minor.

Formerly ENG 213. Students who have already passed ENG 213 cannot receive credit for CRW 213 and should not take this course.

Prerequisites: Any 100-level English or Creative Writing class or instructor permission.

Course Designation/Attribute: DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually