Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

All too often, one could argue, we leave it up to Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or Hollywood to envision the future: Together, these economic and cultural power brokers are holding our collective imagination captive in lurid fantasies of human optimization, endless economic growth, or gratuitous violence. Alongside the wholescale destruction of the Bay Area in recent blockbuster movies, current, purportedly progressive, initiatives fueled by tech wealth include the turning of entire San Francisco neighborhoods into a tech campus or the creation of a new, planned city on the outskirts of the Bay Area. While seemingly utopian, these visions are deeply rooted in socioeconomic (and subsequently ethnic) exclusion, corporate greed, and tech surveillance. Yet alongside these futures conjured up by tech, finance, and blockbusters, there exists an established, more nuanced, complex body of literary texts that envisions utopian and dystopian futures right here, in the Bay Area (or at least not far from here). Such literary renderings envision our collective response to the actual challenges of accelerating climate breakdown, deadly pandemics, and decaying democratic structures as sites of radical possibility—from which societies freed from capitalism, cars, corporations, and other such calamities emerge. This course will examine these past and present imaginings of our future critically, examining the historical moment that gave birth to each envisioning as well as the concerns, themes, and tropes that are at the focus of these works. Readings will include excerpts of Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1907) and The Scarlet Plague (1912), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975), Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985), Pat Murphy’s The City, Not Long After (1989), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents (1998), Chris Carlsson’s After the Deluge (2004) and When Shells Crumble (2023), Dave Eggers’ The Circle (1913) and The Every (2021), and shorter works by Tommy Orange, as well as Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023), along with other critical works on Bay Area history. Building on the skills students acquired in R1A, this course will continue to develop reading, writing, and research skills with the aim to practice writing longer essays that are rhetorically aware and partake in relevant scholarly conversations. Over the course of this semester, students will submit two shorter essays, before concluding the course by submitting a research paper in which they will partake in a scholarly debate that they feel passionate about.

Book List

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Talents. (any edition)
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (any edition)
Dave Eggers’ The Circle. (any edition)

All other course readings will be made available to you through bCourses.

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills