LIT 3313 Spring 2022 Tran

Mutants, robots, zombies, and other super- or non-human beings abound in popular literature and media today. Recognizing the resonance of science fiction (SF) in our contemporary moment, this course explores the historical, cultural, and critical genealogies of this genre. We will discuss how SF unsettles normative conceptions of time, space, and embodiment and, in doing so, prompts readers to grapple with questions about changing conceptions of the “human,” alternative configurations of race, gender, and sexuality, the contradictions of technology, and the possibilities of social justice in the present. This course therefore invites students not only to analyze the construction of science fictional worlds in literature and popular culture, but also to examine the worlding of science fiction, that is, the multiple identities through which it shapes our shared cultural landscape—as a genre, a marketing tag, a set of reading protocols, as the opposite of realism, as a type of realism, as a theoretical framework, and activist praxis. We will engage a range of cultural texts, including short stories, novels, film, and comics that capture the many different forms SF assumes and the breadth of the timespaces, dimensions, and worlds it opens up.

This course meets the Genre requirement LMC majors and the Cross-Cultural Studies requirement (x) for Liberal Studies.