Science Fiction

Posted on Jul 12, 2014 in Teaching | 0 comments

In the Autumn, Spring and Summer Terms of 2014-15, I'll be teaching a new undergraduate module on Science Fiction with my Birkbeck colleague Dr Joe Brooker, as an optional module at Level 6 on our BA English programme.

The module introduces students to some of the key concepts and methodological approaches used in the contemporary study of science fiction (SF). SF is understood inclusively, as a capacious genre overlapping at times with fantasy, utopian/dystopian literature, Gothic, satire, speculative fiction, and the alternate mappings of literary history offered by modernism or postmodernism. Focusing on its development throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, we will consider the ways in which SF has evolved: in particular in the novel and the short story, but also at times invoking other forms such as drama and film. We will be drawing on a range of critical approaches through which to explore some of the defining interests of SF literature and to reflect upon its critical reception in secondary literature. 

To view the handbook for this module in 2014-15 please click on the link.

Course Overview:

AUTUMN TERM 2014

Week 1
Introduction: Defining SF & Genre Debates [JB & CE]
Darko Suvin, ‘Estrangement and Cognition’ in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1979), pp. 3-15
Carl Freedman, ‘Definitions: Science Fiction’ in Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 20000, pp. 13-23 

Week 2
Origins I: Voyages Extraordinaires [CE]
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) 

Week 3
Origins II: The Scientific Romance [CE]
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)  

Week 4
Technological Anxieties I: The Cybernetic Imagination [CE]
E. M. Forster, ‘The Machine Stops’ (1909)
John W. Campbell, ‘The Last Evolution’ (1932)

Week 5
Technological Anxieties II: Robot Rebellions [CE]
Karel Čapek, Rossum’s Universal Robots (1920) 

Week 6
Reading Week – no class

Week 7 
Galactic Encounters I: The Space Opera [CE]
Brian Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958)

Week 8
Galactic Encounters II: Queering Sexuality in Space [CE]
Samuel R. Delany, ‘Aye, and Gomorrah…’ (1967)

Week 9
Critical Utopias: Feminism, Ecology and the New Left [CE]
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)

Week 10
Critical Dystopias: The Shadow of Thatcher and Reagan [CE]
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Week 11
Reflections on Science Fiction Scholarship [JB &CE]
Fredric Jameson, ‘Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1982) [available on the Science Fiction Studies website: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/27/jameson.html] 
Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ [available here: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf] 

SPRING TERM 2015

Week 1
Women Writers and the SF Short Story [JB]  
Clare Winger Harris, ‘The Fate of the Poseidonia’ (1927)
Judith Merril, ‘That Only a Mother’ (1948)
Judith Merril, ‘Stormy Weather’ (1954)

Week 2
Golden Age Satire & Social Criticism: 1 [JB]
Frederik Pohl, ‘The Tunnel Under the World’ (1953)
— ‘Day Million’ (1966)
Robert Sheckley, ‘Specialist’ (1953)

Week 3
Golden Age Satire & Social Criticism: 2 [JB]
Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451 (1953)

Week 4
Philip K. Dick & the Paranoid Imagination: 1 [JB]
Philip K. Dick, ‘The Minority Report’ (1956)
 — ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ (1966)

Week 5
Philip K. Dick & the Paranoid Imagination: 2 [JB]
Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969)

Reading week – no class

Week 7
The New Wave [JB]
J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
— ‘The Voices of Time’ (1962) 
Pamela Zoline, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’ (1967)
 
Week 8
Cyberpunk: 1 [JB]
William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1981)
— Neuromancer (1983)

Week 9
Cyberpunk: 2 [JB]
Pat Cadigan, ‘Pretty Boy Credo’ (1986)
Mary Rosenblum, Chimera (1993)

Week 10
Octavia Butler & the Politics of Embodiment [JB]
Octavia Butler, ‘Speech Sounds’ (1983)
— Dawn (1987)

Week 11
Genre Blend [JB]
Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994)

SUMMER TERM 2015

Week 1
Guest Panel Discussion
Featuring invited speakers with expertise in science fiction.

Week 2
Drop-in Tutorials on Essay Planning [JB & CE]

To view the handbook for this module in 2014-15 please click on the link.

Image by James Vaughan under a CC BY-NC-SA license.