American Dystopia
At a time when civil rights are being revoked, environmental protections dismantled, immigrants deported without due process, and tech billionaires entrusted with restructuring the government—all under the banner of saving the country from what the president has termed ‘American carnage’—this course will engage with American imaginations of dystopia. As the American historian Jill Lepore writes in 2017, we live in "a golden age for dystopian fiction."
Dystopia can be approached as a literary genre, a structure of feeling, and already lived reality for some. As one of the most popular modes of speculative fiction—particularly resonant in times of environmental crisis, right-wing resurgence, and surveillance capitalism—dystopia is deeply rooted in the modern literary tradition of political critique. Examples such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) are among the most widely read literary works of the twentieth century and readily invoked whenever authoritarianism rears its head. Dystopian fiction entertains the counter-factual as a warning: What if this happened here? What if current developments continue? What if things were (slightly) different? What if this became real? How can we avert this?
As a structure of feeling, dystopia can be mobilized for ambivalent political ends. It has been used to foment fears—frequently racialized—of an invasion, a domestic threat, or social decline to introduce authoritarian or repressive policies. It can also be used to describe the everyday experience of vulnerable populations currently living under conditions of settler colonialism, transphobia, religious fundamentalism, environmental collapse, and white supremacy. But dystopian imaginations also feature glimmers of hope and resilience—portrayals of communities and individuals who survive and resist.
Following the SF scholar Fredric Jameson, who insists that speculative fiction does not give us images of the future but serves to “defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present” (Archaeologies of the Future, 2005), this course will engage literary examples of American dystopia that may help us understand and critically reflect on developments in the contemporary moment.
This is a reading-intensive course and students are required to submit regular reading responses. Our course texts include three novels:
- It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis, depicting the rise of a fascist populist leader in the United States.
- The Future of Another Timeline (2019) by Annalee Newitz, chronicling the adventures of queer-feminist time-travelers trying to change history to save women’s rights in the present.
- Goliath (2022) by Tochi Onyebuchi, imagining diverse communities struggling to rebuild Earth’s crumbling cities amidst environmental collapse after most White people have left for space.
At a time when civil rights are being revoked, environmental protections dismantled, immigrants deported without due process, and tech billionaires entrusted with restructuring the government—all under the banner of saving the country from what the president has termed ‘American carnage’—this course will engage with American imaginations of dystopia. As the American historian Jill Lepore writes in 2017, we live in "a golden age for dystopian fiction."
Dystopia can be approached as a literary genre, a structure of feeling, and already lived reality for some. As one of the most popular modes of speculative fiction—particularly resonant in times of environmental crisis, right-wing resurgence, and surveillance capitalism—dystopia is deeply rooted in the modern literary tradition of political critique. Examples such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) are among the most widely read literary works of the twentieth century and readily invoked whenever authoritarianism rears its head. Dystopian fiction entertains the counter-factual as a warning: What if this happened here? What if current developments continue? What if things were (slightly) different? What if this became real? How can we avert this?
As a structure of feeling, dystopia can be mobilized for ambivalent political ends. It has been used to foment fears—frequently racialized—of an invasion, a domestic threat, or social decline to introduce authoritarian or repressive policies. It can also be used to describe the everyday experience of vulnerable populations currently living under conditions of settler colonialism, transphobia, religious fundamentalism, environmental collapse, and white supremacy. But dystopian imaginations also feature glimmers of hope and resilience—portrayals of communities and individuals who survive and resist.
Following the SF scholar Fredric Jameson, who insists that speculative fiction does not give us images of the future but serves to “defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present” (Archaeologies of the Future, 2005), this course will engage literary examples of American dystopia that may help us understand and critically reflect on developments in the contemporary moment.
This is a reading-intensive course and students are required to submit regular reading responses. Our course texts include three novels:
- It Can’t Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis, depicting the rise of a fascist populist leader in the United States.
- The Future of Another Timeline (2019) by Annalee Newitz, chronicling the adventures of queer-feminist time-travelers trying to change history to save women’s rights in the present.
- Goliath (2022) by Tochi Onyebuchi, imagining diverse communities struggling to rebuild Earth’s crumbling cities amidst environmental collapse after most White people have left for space.