Study of speculative fiction (or science fiction) as a genre. Topics may vary from semester to semester. Focus may be historical or thematic.

This course will examine in-depth the history of speculative fiction and its engagement with the themes and topics of the new life sciences, representation of cloning, ecological dystopias, hybrid life forms, genetic engineering dystopias. While science is the thematic point of departure of speculative fiction, the concerns of this course will be the literary. How do literary encounters with the projected realities of the new biology revise our conceptions of the subject? Could there be a Leopold Bloom of the genetically engineered subject whose interior voice is the free-flowing expression of experience? Behind the endless removes of social, material, and technological mediation lie the construction of flesh and blood body, separated from itself through the workings of consciousness. If indeed the post/modern subject requires a psychic space shaped by the authenticity of being, a consciousness deeply rooted in the human experience, how do we represent that being whose point of origin is the artificial, the inauthentic? These are some of the questions to be addressed in this course.

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Requirements class fulfills