Interview one of your classmates and prepare to report the following information to the rest of the class:




Course Goals:


-    Understand the making of science fiction as a genre and its historical role as social critique

-    Gain mastery over a specific area of science fiction by adopting a critical strategy such as Marxism, feminism, or psychology

-    Appreciate the roles of women writers in science fiction (Butler)

-    In what ways does science fiction offers solutions to solve our social problems?

- What would the world look like if science were employed to address social justice issues such as equality, fairness, and tolerance between diverse races, creeds, and genders?

How do you define "science fiction"?


From Dictionary.com:


science fiction   1. A literary or cinematic genre in which fantasy,

typically based on speculative scientific discoveries or developments,

environmental changes, space travel, or life on other planets, forms part of the plot or background.

2. literary fantasy involving the imagined impact of science on society


From OED: Imaginative fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries

or spectacular environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets

and involving space or time travel. (first used in 1851)




SF Communities: Star Trek (Trekkies); Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard (Scientologists); Comicon, other conventions

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?
 Science in Bacon

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

DYSTOPIAN


List the acts of violence in Parable of the Sower:


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:

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