LIT
6856
Bridging the Pernicious
Chasm:
Utopia, Dystopia, and
Science Fiction
Professor Phillip Wegner
Wednesday 6-8 (12:50-3:50 p.m.)
Turlington 4112
Office: Turlington 4012C (Graduate Coordinators Office)
Turlington 4115
Office
Hours: by
appointment
Phone: 392-6650, ex. 231; ex. 261
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/pwegner/home.htm
As
long as man concentrates his interest contemplatively upon the past or future, both ossify into an alien
existence. And between the subject and the object lies the
unbridgeable "pernicious chasm" of the present. Man must
be able to comprehend the present as becoming. He can do this by
seeing
in it the tendencies out of whose dialectical opposition he can make the future. Only when he does
this will the present be a process of becoming that belongs to him.
Georg Lukács, History
and Class Consciousness
In a
well-known essay, which we will read this semester, Fredric Jameson
argues that
the "deepest vocation" of science fiction is "over and over
again to
demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future, to
body
forth, through apparently full representations which prove on closer
inspection
to be structurally and constitutively impoverished, the atrophy in our
time of
what Marcuse has called the utopian
imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference." Rather than a critique of science
fiction, Jameson argues that this failure is the genre's strength, as
in this
way science fiction's
"multiple
mock futures serve the quite different function of transforming our own
present
into the determinate past of something yet to come," and thus enable us
to
perceive the present as history, what Georg Lukács refers to in
the epigraph
above as "a process of becoming."
This
semester, we will explore the path by which Jameson arrives at this
conclusion,
including its roots in the wide-ranging discussion of utopia offered by
Ernst
Bloch and the groundbreaking formulation of science fiction as the
"literature
of cognitive estrangement" offered by Darko Suvin, by examining some of
the key
texts in the development of the theorization of three deeply
interrelated fields
of inquiry: those of utopia, dystopia, and science fiction. Along the way, we will examine such
issues as utopia as both a modern literary form and as a cultural
hermeneutic;
the political stakes in the emergence and flourishing during the last
century
of utopia's dialectical inversion, the dystopia; some of the approaches
we can
take to the study of a literary genre; and the still vital importance
of
science fiction as a way of thinking our global present.
Readings
Students will be responsible for procuring copies of all the readily available readings for the semester. Harder to find, out-of-print, and shorter texts will be made available as the semester progresses.
Aims and Methods
1. Full presence in every spatial, ontological, existential, and intellectual sense of the word, as well as active and engaged participation in the seminar discussions. Given your presence here, I assume that all of you are looking forward as much as I am to having the opportunity for a serious and careful engagement with these texts. Thus, the most general expectation that I have for this semester is that all of you intend to read these works, and to do so in a responsible and rigorous fashion, and in a spirit of good faith and intellectual camaraderie. I would ask then that you make every effort to engage in, to use a much abused term, a dialogue with these works, being attentive to their respective voices, acknowledging their particular historical and otherwise contingent beings in the world, and finally working to imagine how we today might best retool the insights and modes of analysis of their various "unfinished projects." In this way, I hope that we will develop a much more complex and profitable understanding of both the power and originality of these arguments and traditions.
2. In order to facilitate and enrich our discussion of these works, I want to ask each of you to be responsible for introducing and situating each week's readings. As I imagine all of our work fundamentally to be a collective project, you will do this in groups of three, with each group being responsible for the readings on two different occasions. Each group will be asked both to provide a brief introduction to the material and to serve as general "experts" on the readings for that week. Your group can take a variety of approaches to this task: you may want to highlight some of the central issues the readings address; briefly outline their main arguments; note the ways they engage with what has come before; place them in historical, intellectual, and political contexts; note connections to other models and practices; give overviews of some of the secondary readings on these works; offer some questions for discussion; and so forth. I only ask that you keep the opening comments brief (15 minutes maximum total) so that we can begin our general discussion as soon as possible. I also hope that your groups will continue to work together throughout the semester, sharing ideas, giving support, discussing research projects, drinking beer, and other important tasks. I will be very happy to meet with your group beforehand to suggest some secondary readings and discuss approaches and tactics.
3. Given that this is a course is utopia and science fiction, I thought I would take the opportunity to engage in a couple of experiments. First, you will note in the schedule of readings that the final weeks of the semester are currently listed as TBA. This is because I wanted to give the class as a whole an opportunity to shape our readings, following up on your emerging interests and passions. I've included a list of readings that we might select from—I would ask that all of you read a little bit about these work as soon as possible so we can make our decisions in the coming weeks. I also have copies of most of these books, and I would be happy to lend anyone them for further perusal. And of course, I would be open to other possibilities.
4. Secondly, you will also note that our readings this semester consist exclusively of theoretical and literary historical texts. In order to enrich and deepen your understanding of these interrelated genres, I want to also ask you to take time during the semester to read or view as much as possible in the forms, periods, and media that most interest you. Use the works we will look at this semester, or some of the suggested reference works, as resources to shape your selections. I want also to ask you to keep a log of your reading or viewing (a short page or so of comments is all that is required), and to seriously consider choosing one or more of these texts as the focus of your final project (see # 5 below).
5. For the major written component of the course, I will ask each of you to develop an independent research program, which will take one of two forms: either a) two shorter essays of 10-15 pages in length examining the questions or issues raised by the material in more depth, or drawing connections between these works and other areas of interest; or, b) a major critical research project of some 25-30 pages in length. The aim of the longer project will be to produce: 1) a sustained engagement with some of the works we discuss in class; 2) a further independent examination of the issues raised by the work we have looked at; 3) a discussion drawing upon some of the recommended secondary or additional readings; or 4) an original reading of one of the texts on your reading list or any other work –be it literary, theoretical, filmic, architectural, cultural, or otherwise— deploying the concepts and models we elaborate during the course of the semester. I would also like to ask that all PhD students plan to pursue option b, with the goal of producing an essay that will serve either as the basis of a dissertation chapter or a publishable essay (or even both). I ask each of you who choose this second option to turn in a detailed paper proposal, complete with bibliography, about a month before the paper is due. If you require additional time to work on this project, I am happy to allow you to do so. However, in order to avoid extending the course indefinitely, I expect that the project will be completed by the end of the spring term; work turned in after that time should not expect to receive extensive comments.
