Content, Goals, Requirements:
This is a course about the genre of science fiction, but instead of beginning with the question, what is science fiction? we will begin with the question, what is a genre? The first few weeks will be about introducing students to developments in genre theory over the last couple of decades, emphasizing the way that a historical approach to genre has displaced earlier theories that assumed genres are ahistorical, purely formal entities. The historical approach to genres opens up questions about what constitutes a genre and a genre system; about the relations between and among different contemporary genre systems (e.g. the ones operating in commercial publishing and the book trade, in the film industry, in television, and in academic practice); and about the various types of agency and motives exercised by those who construct and maintain genre categories while writing, adapting, editing, publishing, reading, collecting, and criticizing fiction. The course then moves in fairly short order to the question of what science fiction is and has been. We will read about and discuss debates over the definition, structure, and form of science fiction, and about the resources it offers for thinking about a number of topics including colonialism, gender ideology, and the category of the human itself.
Student Learning Outcomes:
- basic fluency in the contemporary state of genre theory
- advanced knowledge of critical debates within the field of science fiction studies
- a sense of the ongoing intersections and tensions between mass culture and literary tradition
Assignments:
Students will write a short critical essay on an assigned topic early in the semester; do a teaching exercise leading discussion on a fictional text (students will choose the texts); write a well-researched critical essay due at the end of the course; and present to the class a short, “conference paper” version of the final project.
Reading list:
genre theory:
John Frow, Genre
excerpts from: Rick Altman, Film/Genre; Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature; Hans-Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception; Jason Mittel, Genre and Television; John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System.
essays on science fiction:
Istvan Csicery-Ronay, “Science Fiction and Empire”
Samuel R. Delany, “About 5,750 Words”
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe), “Indigenous Scientific Literacies in Nalo Hopkinson’s Ceremonial Worlds”
Fredric Jameson, “Progress vs. Utopia, or Can We Imagine the Future?”
Roger Luckhurst, “The Many Deaths of Science Fiction: A Polemic”
John Rieder, “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History”
Joanna Russ, “The Image of Women in Science Fiction”
Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre”
and others
science fiction texts
H. G. Wells, “The Star” (1897)
C. L. Moore, “Shambleau” (1933)
Stanley Weinbaum, “A Martian Odyssey” (1934)
Robert A. Heinlien, “All You Zombies” (1959)
Philip K. Dick, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966)
Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967)
William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” (1982)
Octavia Butler, “Speech Sounds” (1983)
Charles Stross, “Rogue Farm” (2003)
and others
Texts ordered at UH Bookstore:
Evans, Arthur, et. al. eds. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2010.
Frow, John, Genre. Second edition. Routledge, 2014.
Latham, Rob, ed., Science Fiction Criticism: An Anthology of Essential Writings. Bloomsbury, 2017.