English 179 - Spring, 2014

Topics in Comparative American Literatures

Topic: Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Post-Civil Rights Era

Class Information

Instructor: Jerng, Mark
Time: TR 3:10-4:30
Location: 251 Olson

Description

In an interview, Junot Diaz describes looking both at his grandmother, who worked as a tenant farmer in the Dominican Republic in near-slavery conditions, and at his brother, a US marine combat veteran, and asks how one accounts for such a disjunction and simultaneity. Diaz concludes: “It’s really helpful for people to assemble selves not always deploying realism…realism cannot account for my little brother and my grandmother, but Octavia Butler’s science fiction can, and Samuel Delany’s generic experiments can.” This class takes Diaz’s thoughts as their point of departure and explores science fiction and fantasy written from the 1970s to the present in order to think about how these genres provide a better account of the divergent experiences of the “post Civil-Rights era” than “realism” does. In what ways are fantasy and science fiction better resources for expressing the co-existence of formal equality and structural inequality, a better way of exploring a moment of race relations in which symbolic gains co-exist with increased dispossession for others, and in which the history of slavery gets revived in various forms of unfreedom and ownership? This course explores various writers, from Diaz, Butler, and Delany, to Kenneth Liu, and Sherman Alexie, to analyze the relationships among race, historicity, citizenship, capital, and war in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Grading

Participation and Attendance: 10%
Midterm 15%
Short Exercise: Write a piece of fan fiction 15%
Textual Analysis Paper 20%
Online Book Review Final Project 20%
Final Exam: 20%

Texts

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Kindred, Octavia Butler
Flight, Sherman Alexie
Return from Neveryona, Samuel Delany
Midnight Robber, Nalo Hopkinson