LIT 3383 Spring 2025 - Biagi

In writings throughout history and literature, nature has typically been personified as a woman. Yet nature—like woman, like humanity itself—is multitudinous. Writers have alternately described it as powerful, dangerous, idealized, Edenic, submissive, a landscape to be exploited and plundered, a landscape on the verge of collapse, and an unknowable entity with its own agentive force. Speculative fiction as a genre affords a unique interrogation of these complex, shifting forms of nature and how nature reflects our own complex, shifting human nature back at us. In this course, we will read women writers throughout time whose speculative eco-fiction examines society, gender, sexuality, identity, race, class, utopia, climate change, and more. We’ll start with Margaret Cavendish’s convention-defying utopian text published in 1666, The Blazing World, followed by Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking science fiction novel Frankenstein. Next, we’ll turn to the contemporary landscape with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, short stories by Louise Erdrich, and speculative eco-inspired music and film. This course satisfies the diversity requirement.