English 824-001
Seminar in Special Topics in Literature: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia
Instr: Sands, Peter
Office: CRT 578; 229-4416
e-mail: sands@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: W; 3:30-6:10pm; CRT 321
Course Description
"Utopia has always been a political issue, an unusual destiny for a literary form: yet just as the literary value of the form is subject to permanent doubt, so also its political status is structurally ambiguous. The fluctuations of its historical context do nothing to resolve this variability, which is also not a matter of taste or individual judgment. . . .
It has often been observed that we need to distinguish between the Utopian form and the Utopian wish: between the written text or genre and something like a Utopian impulse detectable in daily life and its practices by a specialized hermeneutic or interpretive method. Why not add political practice to this list . . . ? . . . At any rate, the futility of definitions can be measured by the way in which they exclude whole areas of the preliminary inventory."
So begins Fredric Jameson's magisterial Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). This course addresses the definitional questions and political status of utopianism and science fiction by putting recent critical work of Jameson, Samuel Delany, and Thomas M. Disch in conversation with the history of critical engagement with the two genres, and with recent novels that straddle high/low cultural and genre lines—so-called "slipstream" fiction. Readings will include a substantial amount of Jameson, Disch's On SF, Delany's About Writing, and selections from Darko Suvin, Tom Moylan, Carl Freedman, Jenny Wolmark, Donna Haraway, and others, as well as (probably) novels by China Mieville (Perdido Street Station), Jeffrey Ford (The Physiognomist), Samuel Delany (Tales of Neveryona or Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) and Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake). We will likely screen at least one film as well.
We will address definitional questions: what is science fiction? Utopian fiction? Does one subsume the other?; genre questions: is X literature? Why or why not?; and interpretive methods suitable for genre fiction and film. Students will make short seminar presentations and write an annotated bibliography and one conference-length paper (8-10 pages).
