English 44 - Summer Sessions II, 2021

Introductory Topics in Fiction

Topic: Pandemics in Fiction: Storytelling as Survival

Class Information

Instructor: Genesy, Claire
CRN: 71420
Time: TR 11:00-1:30
GE Areas: Writing Experience

Description

In the past year (2020) the second most-watched movie was Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion about a viral pandemic. Pandemic plots and fiction have been picked up and picked through as we move through our current moment. In this course we will be looking at literary representations of pandemics and plagues in order to discern the purpose fiction serves us in offering a way through and within a temporality that seems never-ending and monotonous even as it is sequestered and contained. While this course will be mostly comprised of 20th century short stories and texts, we will start with Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron (1351), written after the Black Death. It follows the escape from the city of a brigata of young wealthy Florentines who tell stories (a dizzying 100) to pass their time in quarantine. The storytelling becomes synonymous with their survival even as it acts as a privileged escape. This course seeks to facilitate important questions around the function and possibilities of fiction in pandemic-time. Do these stories use fiction as deflection and escape from their respective pandemics or do they, with their strict adherence to form, offer an inoculation against seemingly randomized pain and anxiety? In short, is fiction purpose or privilege, or both? While The Decameron serves as an introductory collection of pandemic and plague fiction, the remaining texts will offer a "contemporary" collection of short stories that seek to delineate the purpose of storytelling. Many offer structures of care-work and kinship that differ from our current forms of crisis-care and rigid sets of relations and in so doing, create a critical practice of care and hope that extends beyond the human. Our primary texts, in addition to The Decameron will include: Octavia Butler's "Speech Sounds", Greg Bear's "Blood Music", David Brin's "The Giving Plague", Tannarive Due's "Patient Zero", Connie Willis' "The Last of the Winnebagos", James Tiptree's (aka Alice Sheldon) "The Last Fight of Doctor Ain" and the comic "Undiscovered Country." All of your reading will be available on Canvas as either pdfs or links. Most of the course itself will be asynchronous with Monday check-ins on past and upcoming material.

Texts

"Blood Music", Greg Bear
"Speech Sounds", Octavia Butler
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
"The Giving Plague", David Brin
"Patient Zero", Tannarive Due
"The Last of the Winnebagos", Connie Willis
"The Last Flight of Doctor Ain", James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon)
Undiscovered Country, Charles Soule, Scott Snyder