Freshman and Sophomore seminars offer lower-division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester. Enrollment limits are set by the faculty, but the suggested limit is 25.

How does a transforming society imagine its own future? How do technological change, scientific innovation, and revolutionary politics shape the writing and reading of literature? How might a popular literary genre like science fiction help us to think through the ethical and philosophical questions raised by changing relationships between humans and technology, nature, and other humans? Is science fiction about the future, or the present? This seminar offers students an opportunity to explore these questions by engaging intensively with Russian and Soviet science fiction, one of the world’s richest traditions of science fiction writing. Russian and Soviet science fiction emerged in a society undergoing rapid change and modernization. Both before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, science fiction offered a form of writing that could pose and answer questions about the utopian possibilities of revolutionary change, as well as the dystopian threats of its unintended outcomes. In the second half of the twentieth century, Soviet science fiction asked important questions about the ethical problems raised by life in a modernized, technologized society. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought new challenges: what happens to science fiction when the utopian vision of the future disappears? Class is conducted in English; no knowledge of Russian required. This course should be of particular interest to students interested in science fiction, ethics and philosophy, literature, and history, as well as prospective and current majors in Russian and other literatures.

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Requirements class fulfills