Course Syllabus--Spring 1999

Eng 373: Science Fiction and Fantasy

-----The Space of Contemporary Allegory

Professor: D. F. Felluga
Office Hours: T,Th 1:00-2:30
HEAV 430; telephone: 43770
E-mail: felluga@omni.cc.purdue.edu

the Enterprise

Course Description

This course will posit that speculative fiction represents one of the only still viable generic forms that deals with the present in an allegorical form. Starting from this premise, we will address a number of issues in contemporary culture through the fictions we will be reading and viewing on screen, specifically postmodernism, our contemporary carceral culture, politics and power, the Holocaust, and late capitalism. I will suggest, in other words, that speculative fiction gives us a special access to the ways we make sense of the world in our everyday lives. By pushing to the limits such issues as subjectivity, temporal sequentiality, and representation, speculative fiction can uncover the ways ideology, narrative, and epistemology function on a day-to-day basis. In short, as we progress through this semester we will be taking "science fiction" seriously and will consequently be dealing with a number of "serious" issues that concern us in our contemporary culture.

There is also a Web page that will serve as a studying resource; it includes a list of definitions for terms that we discuss in class. It can be found at the following URL:

http://omni.cc.purdue.edu/~felluga/guidesf.html.


sky shotCELL ONE: exploding world

NARRATIVE AND REPRESENTATION:
THE LIMITATIONS OF HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS

In these first four weeks, I will introduce students to the basic structures of narrative form, specifically the distinction between story and discourse and between the proairetic and hermeneutic codes of narrative. A number of pop cultural shows and experimental films will serve to help us in our exploration of the narrative limitations of human consciousness.

sky shotCELL TWO:

MONSTERS, CYBORGS, AND THE HUMAN

In this next block of classes, we will read arguably the first science-fiction story, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is not a coincidence, I will argue, that this tale appears at the very cusp of the industrial revolution and, thus, at the advent of our own capitalist, scientific, post-Enlightenment culture. In many ways, Frankenstein represents one of the first and best examples of the use of speculative scenarios to explore issues relavent to contemporary culture. I will introduce students to the important concepts relavent to the Englightenment and Romanticism since these concepts and issues continue to play an important role in all fiction to follow. (It is not a coincidence, for example, that William Gibson's most influential novel is titled Neuromancer.) Given the incredible structural complexity of Shelley's tale, we will also be able to continue our discussions of narrative form.

sky shotCELL THREE:

NONFUNCTIONAL:
MARCH BREAK

sky shotCELL FOUR: phases of the moon

POWER AND PARANOIA:
UNDERSTANDING IDEOLOGY AND SUBJECTIVITY

In this third week, I will explore some of the elements that constitute our contemporary form of social control. Michel Foucault's important social history, Discipline and Punish, will help us to understand what he terms our "carceral culture," in which government and police achieve ever greater powers in accessing the most private spheres of our lives and in which we are led to internalize governmental power structures. What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a system? Behind both Foucault's theories and George Orwell's 1984 lies the Holocaust, which could be said to mark the break between postmodernism and what came before, the moment after which one could no longer uncritically accept such Englightenment values as progress, scientific exploration, democracy, rationality, and efficiency.

sky shotCELL FIVE:

WHAT IS POSTMODERNISM?

In these final weeks, we will explore in detail the delineaments of our own culture through science fiction. Our age has been termed the postmodern age. We will attempt to figure out what constitutes that age, including computer culture, image culture, media culture, pop culture, and multiculturalism.

NOTE: BE SURE TO BRING EXAM BOOKLETS TO THE FINAL EXAM AND BEST OF LUCK!

 

HONORS PROJECT REVIEWS

Dan Bender
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Craig Stalbaum
The Sword of Shannara

Graham Sadtler
Tales of Nevèrÿon

Sophie Malik
Return to Nevèrÿon

 

Jonas Moskowitz
A Wrinkle in Thought

 

 

 

chariot race

 

 

Course Directives

Guide to Terms

Undergraduate Guide to Critical Theory




 

Last Revised: April 9, 1999

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