American Dystopia: From Classical to Feminist and Young Adult Dystopian Literature

Dozent/in:

Yildiz Asar

Termine:

Di, 14:00 - 16:00, Raum n.V.
Einzeltermin am 22.11.2021, 19:00 - 21:00, Raum n.V.

Inhalt:

Dystopian accounts of non-existent places worse than the ones we live in are more popular today than ever before. But why? According to Tom Moylan in Scraps of the Untainted Sky, dystopian narrative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century. A hundred years of exploitation, repression, state violence, war, genocide, disease, famine, ecocide provided more than enough fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination (xi). In this course, we will inspect the dystopian turn in contemporary American literature. We will examine dystopia s form, central themes and subject-matters and its relation to the prevailing and shifting cultural discourses. Indeed, with the terrifying worlds that it portrays, dystopia can voice our worst contemporary fears and anxieties, cast a critical eye on the pressing global issues, warn and frighten, and also fill us with hope for a change, or perhaps a better future.

Starting from the post-WW2 era, we will first examine the rise of the Classical Dystopia (which British titles like Orwell s 1984 and Huxley s Brave New World came to embody) through Ray Bradbury s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), followed by the Feminist Critical Dystopia, focusing on Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid s Tale (1985) and Octavia Butler s Parable of the Sower (1993), and end with today s popular Young Adult Dystopia, with Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (2008) as a key example.

In our readings, we will particularly pay attention to how gender, race, age, class and environmental issues are depicted in these texts. By the end of the semester, we will hopefully have a good grasp of the reasons behind dystopia s ever-increasing appeal for older and younger audiences and its relevance for our contemporary times.

Empfohlene Literatur:

Primary Readings:

• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid s Tale
• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
• Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Only the first novel, but I would highly recommend the entire trilogy if you have the time!)

Throughout this course, we will also briefly refer to several other titles and critical texts which are to be announced.