Topics in Literary & Critical Theory
Topic: Reproductive Futurism in Literature, Film, & Theory
Class Information
Instructor: Menely, Tobias
CRN: 45287
Time: MW 12:10-1:30
Location: Remote Instruction
Description
"Reproductive Futurism in Literature, Film, & Theory"
In this seminar, we will explore _reproductive futurism_, which is Lee Edelman's term for the way in which the figure of the child organizes visions of the social good and collective future. We'll read critical theory, two novels, selections from an epic retelling of the Book of Genesis, and we'll watch two films. All of these texts navigate particularly fraught and fascinating territory at the sharp intersection between biology and society, including the family, sexuality and desire, procreation (as love and as labor), reproductive choice, the politics of population, inter-generational justice, and non-anthropocentric kin-making. We'll read criticism and theory by Catherine Gallagher, Barbara Johnson, Hortense Spillers, Donna Haraway, Lee Edelman, Rebekah Sheldon, Sophie Lewis, Charlotte Sussman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and others. Our aesthetic objects will include Milton's _Paradise Lost_ (excerpted), Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ and Jesmyn Ward's _Salvage the Bones_, as well as Alfonso Cuaron's _Children of Men_ and Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed's _My Octopus Teacher_. This is an upper-level seminar in literary and critical theory, so students should be prepared to grapple with speculative texts that, like great imaginative literature, test the limits of the thinkable, asking us to consider the child not defined by the family, futurity untethered from children, sexuality unlinked to reproduction, and kinship that extends beyond the human.