1/29 Goals:
a) to better understand the discourse around science
fiction as a genre, particularly its standing in the
academy, and among its writers, critics, and readers.
b) learn/practice critical reading strategies that yield
to clear positions on academic debates (Position Paper
Assignment + Annotated Bibliography).
2/5 Goals:
- to better understand the scholarly debate around Marxism
and SF
- and appreciate some of the pre-history of SF (before
1900).
What does your ideal utopia look like?
- no money
- work = play
- sunshine
- no cubicles
- everyone has what they need, and no one is w/o
- no fences
- humanistic ideals are shared by all
- no death or sickness
- learning for its own sake
Science in Bacon
- magic pills
- bioengineering of plants, animals / genetics
- 482: weather houses
- 488: airplanes
Communist Utopia?
ch. 2: abolition of private property
no family / free love
26: no inheritance
26: agriculture as big communal farm, no division between
country and city
27: free education
no rebels
no religion
no class distinctions
What is utopic/utopian and
dystopic/dystopian about the One State?
UTOPIAN / TOTALITARIAN
- uniform standard of living (food, job, shelter)
- no battling over sex partners, political choices
- allowed to work to their inclinations and strengths
- no money
- no crime
- equality
DYSTOPIAN
- no choice
- no choice over sexual partners
- no freedom, no privacy, no free time
- no families
- no booze
- petroleum food
- draconian government
- no subjectivity, individualism, imagination
- no questions
List the acts of violence in Parable of the Sower:
- Arson of the community
- Cannibalism
- Child sex slavery/abuse
- Decapitation
- Disembowelment
- Dogs eating people
- Extortion
- Family beatings (Olaminas)
- Immolation
- Looting / Mob Violence
- Rape
- Security guards
- Slavery
- Stabbing and shooting
- Starvation
- The Olaminas
Which plan for utopia--the One State, the World State, or
Earthseed's Destiny--seems more likely to solve global
warming, violence, over-consumption, and the decay of
society? Why or why not? Which utopian society would you
rather live in?
Die schöne Seele = beautiful soul
• Concept, going back to antiquity
(Plato), of a being that lives in complete harmony with
nature
• In his Aesthetic Letters, Schiller ties
the beautiful soul to an aesthetic education that balances
the pull between duty and inclination, on the one hand
(Pflicht und Neigung), and reason and sensuality (Vernunft
und Sinnlichkeit), on the other.
• See also Rousseau, la belle âme
Added to Bibliography/Readings:
- Bastian, Michelle. "Haraway’s Lost Cyborg and
the Possibilities of Transversalism." Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 31.4 (2006):
1027-49.
- Correction to: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan.
"Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism." Storming the Reality
Studio: a Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science
Fiction. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham and
London: Duke UP, 1991. 182-93.
- Haney, William S. "Cyborgs, Posthumanism and
Short Fiction." Atenea 28.2 (Dec. 2008)" 157-67.
- Stevenson, Michelle Colleen. "Trying to Plug In:
Posthuman Cyborgs and the Search for Connection." Science
Fiction Studies 34.1 (Mar 2007): 87-105.
- Voller, Jack G. "Neuromanticism: Cyberspace and
the Sublime." Extrapolation 34.1 (Spring 1993):
18-29.
Male/Female Writing: In 1975, Robert Silverberg
introduced Tiptree’s book, Warm World and Otherwise, with
the following comment: “It has been suggested that Tiptree
is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me
something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I
don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been
written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a
woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James
Tiptree stories is male” (qtd. in Barr 37).
Do you think there anything particularly “male” or “female”
about Tiptree’s writing style? What about Dick’s style,
which Freedman says has all “the unadorned functionality of
neo-Heinleinian prose” (38), but that nonetheless allows for
“the play of heteroglossia” (41). This last point—if you
agree with it—could be important in terms of Haraway’s
argument. She of course concludes The Cyborg Manifesto with
these lines: “This is a dream not of a common language, but
of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of
a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the
circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both
building and destroying machines, identities, categories,
relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the
spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”
(475).
Barr, Marleen S. Alien to Femininity: Speculative
Fiction and Feminist Theory. NY: Greenwood, 1987.
Research
Questions?
- postcolonial readings of SF
- work on nostalgia in literature?
- Ethics and SF/Lit./science
- Asimov and others: Why is the robot male?
- We: uncharacteristic responses to art (music,
poetry); treatment of imagination; complicated
relationship between minorities and females in
SF/"othering" of them (how can antiquated notions exist
in a supposedly progressive genre?); influence of
this book on BNW
- Feminism and dystopia/utopia
- Religious references (in We)
- Zamyatin's political viewpoint
- Comparison of Anthem (Rand) and We, or
We
and The Giver
- Winged imagery in We
- Female / male roles in dystopian novels: how have
they differed/shared similarities since BNW?
- What is it to be human? What is human nature?
- What do BNW and We say about class structure?
- What is relationship between society and happiness?
between society and identity?
- How is marriage treated in SF? How does it feed into
gender roles?
- How does BNW fit into developmental
narratives/adolescent development?
- Comparison of the role of the protagonist in BNW
(Bernard/John) and We (I-330/D-503)?
- How are Christian ideas of suffering/Heaven/Hell
challenged in BNW and We?
- Similarities of Wizard of Oz to SF narratives
- What constitutes community? How do socio- and
political-theorists define it? How can we measure the
change of community in Parable?
- The fallacy of "scientism" and what happens when we
can't use science to solve our problems
- Different forms of embodiment in Parable
- At what stage can a machine or a robot really think for
itself?
- Read Parable through the lens of Haraway's dialectic
- What is the function of parallel worlds in science
fiction?
- Freudian or Jungian reading of Bernard Marx in BNW
- Role of the body/mind and head/heart in SF