LIT 499-04 Michael Robertson
Dystopia
The good news is that we are living in a Golden Age of dystopian literature. The bad news is that we are living in a Golden Age of dystopian literature. This course will explore the genre of dystopian literature and consider the contemporary political, economic, and social forces that have made it so popular at this moment. Students will be asked to (re-)read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four before the course starts. We will begin with foundational works of the utopian and dystopian genres—Plato’s Republic, Thomas More’s Utopia, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—before reading some representative recent dystopian works, including Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, and watching Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Theoretical works by Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, Tom Moylan, Darko Suvin, and others will be integrated into the course.