FUTURITIES [Provisional Syllabus]
English 360E
Thursdays, 9-11.50
Professor Michaela Bronstein
Office Hours: MJ 321, Tuesdays3-4.45
Literary studies has long had a wide array of methods for theorizing the past. In more recent years, scholars have begun to theorize the future with equal energy. But what do we talk about when we talk about the future? Events that might happen, the way the thought of the future affects our actions today, or something else entirely? How do writers take the future into account? By representing it—by writing with it as an audience—by thinking about present-day political and ethical responsibilities to the future—and more.
Thinking about futurity, in other words, isn’t just a problem for science fiction. It’s one paradigm for discussing the long reception history of older texts; it’s a necessary term for examining any text that calls for or imagines radical historical change; and it is, in the end, merely an inversion of our familiar habits of seeing historical works as being of the past—to imagine them as past, after all, requires us to think of ourselves as their future. This is a seminar partly about speculative fiction, but only partly; partly about contemporary literature and the future as seen from our present moment, but—again—only partly.
The required primary readings for this classfocus on exampleswhere literary or aesthetic forms of futurity—the way a text endures in time, is received or re-performed; the way texts manipulate our attention to what’s around the corner as we read them—intersect with the political questions that surround imagining a future: should we value the future over our own lives? what kind of futures can we imagine, and why? How are familiar literary experiences and ways of thinking already models of futurity?
Week 1:Queer futurities: Lee Edelman, No Future; José Muñoz, Cruising Utopia; Shakespeare sonnet selection.
Week 2:The performance of futurity / the futurity of performance: Anne Washburn
Jill Dolan; Joseph Roach; Paradise Now
Weeks 3-4: Media futurities; intratextual futurities: David Mitchell
Future of the Novel: Henry James, Zadie Smith
Reception: Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, Stanley Fish, Peter Brooks
Speaking to the future: nuclear semiotics;Future Library
Week 5: Afrofuturism, textual futurity, theological futurity: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
Dipesh Chakrabarty.
Frederic Jameson; John R. Williams.
Week 6: Revolutionary futurities: Joseph Conrad.
Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel; Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future
Week 7:Wartime futurity: Nadine Gordimer; Amiri Baraka.
Fanon, Wretched of the Earth.
Week 8:Individual futurity and the bildungsroman: James Joyce
Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure; Esty, Unseasonable Youth
(By classtime of week 8: select your primary text.)
Thanksgiving
Week 9: Read your own primary text, which can be from any period. I’ll have a list of suggestions.
Week 10: Read your own criticism.
Required primary texts:
Amiri Baraka, The Slave (provisional; edition not yet set)
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents(0446675504, 0446675784)
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (978019955237X)
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (provisional; edition not yet set)
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (provisional; edition not yet set)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (0375507256)
Anne Washburn, Mr Burns (1783191406)
Other readings will be distributed via PDF.
Assessment:
Depending on class size, each student will be responsible either for a few reading responses or a presentation at some point in the quarter.
For the final paper, you can choose between a full seminar paper (6,000-8,000 words), or a conference size paper (2,500-3,500 words) accompanied by a lit review.