English 366

The course has taken an historical survey approach in the past, but beginning in Spring 2004, for several years I will be focusing on specific themes, such as "Feminist Science Fiction," "Utopia/Dystopia," and "Ecological Science Fiction."

For the Spring 2009 version, the theme is "Utopia/Dystopia."

" . . . the ideal of Utopian living involves the imagination in a contradictory project, since they all presumably aim at illustrating and exercising that much-abused concept of freedom that virtually by definition and in its very structure, cannot be defined in advance, let alone exemplified."
Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time

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Special short story on-line. Paolo Bacigalupi. "The Fluted Girl."
http://windupstories.com/pumpsix/the-fluted-girl/

Spring 2009 class members: Please read this on-line essay in preparation for the midterm exam: "The Politics of Utopia," by Fredric Jameson: http://www.newleftreview.net/Issue25.asp?Article=02

The following quotations are especially important:

1) Utopia's "function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but rather in demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future—our imprisonment in a non-utopian present without historicity or futurity—so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined."

2) "No matter how comprehensive and trans-class or post-ideological the inventory of reality’s flaws and defects, the imagined resolution necessarily remains wedded to this or that ideological perspective."

3) "Utopias in fact come to us as barely audible messages from a future that may never come into being."