Lavender, Isiah
MW 10:20 AM
Leconte Hall 322
“Perils of Utopia”
Utopia (future fiction) explores the speculative social imagination in Utopian and Anti-Utopian literature of Western modernity. It studies the speculative imaginations of authors who envision “non-existent” societies and their socio-cultural political engagement with such issues as social change, cultural engineering, sexual politics, mutable embodiment, programming gender and/or race, and the urban cityscape. Intrinsically contradictory in nature, Utopia may be a good place for a few and a bad place for many others. The perils of such a binary (good/bad) represent what we will explore in this class as students navigate the complicated waters of utopian thinking, fostering in them the ability to recognize that Utopia is neither solely a perfect world nor a nightmarish society, but is instead a vehicle for promoting critical thinking about our world today while imagining alternative forms of living for tomorrow or avoiding it.
Danzy Senna, New People
Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation
Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God
Ben H. Winters, Underground Airlines
Rachel Heng, Suicide Club
Mohsin Hamid, Exist West
Lauren Beukes, Afterland
Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction