AML 5027 - Spring 2026 - Ballard

Jean Baudrillard famously wrote of the United States: “What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.” This course takes up Baudrillard’s provocation while adding the crucial modifier of speculative: it enters the speculative fiction of America and seeks to enter America as speculative fiction. We will focus primarily on twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. speculative fiction, staying centered on science fiction while taking up other speculative genealogies and trajectories, including the gothic, fantasy, horror, and the “genre turn.” Our work, though, will not be so much to survey “the” history of American SF as to investigate the intersections where science fiction studies and American studies meet. We will leverage the generative overlaps between these two fields to ask critical questions about how stories and social possibilities shape each other, about the contested and intertwined grounds of how the past is narrated and to whom the future “belongs,” and about the methodological and disciplinary stakes of considering the literary in a multimedia environment and connecting narrative to a variety of extraliterary fields—the political, the historical, the legal, the technological, the ecological, etc. Course assignments will be designed to give you familiarity with some of the fundamental “genres” of academic writing—the conference abstract and CFP; the conference talk; the article—with the hope that each of you leaves the seminar with an original project you can develop for publication.

Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American); a Literary Genre (Fiction). It also meets the Alterity requirement.