2012-2013 Academic Catalog

Aug 31, 2025

2012-2013 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 280 - 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. The course is organized around four subgenres of postwar speculative literature - alternate history, plague and disaster, technology and artificial life, and futurity and posthumanity - in an effort to understand the critical aims and social impact of these authors’ fictional and theoretical thought experiments. Our investigations will also draw on genre theories to explore the shifting conventions of literary, science, and slipstream fictions, and the genre-bending exercises of their authors. Literary and science fiction authors to be studied include Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Roth, Gary Shteyngart, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, Ted Chiang, and Kelly Link. The theories of Fredric Jameson (futurity), Rene Girard (plague), N. Katherine Hayles (posthumanity), and Tzvetan Todorov (the fantastic) will frame our critical examinations.

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