01  TTH6  CAC  73062  FERGUSON  CA-A2

Other Worlds, Other Bodies
Rather than attempt to survey all science fiction writing, this semester we will take up one persistent theme: the human body. Science fiction’s trick is to alter some aspect of the present (new planets, new technology, new drugs) and ask “what if?” But for this to work, there is always some overlap with our own, recognizable world, and this overlap is recurrently grounded in our human ideas of what it means be embodied. With this in mind, we will look at how science fiction negotiates the problem of human bodies in four different frameworks: the gothic, paranoia and drugs, feminist dystopias, and cyberpunk. We may look at how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) offer two gothic visions of voyage and embodiment; how Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) share the themes of drugs and mind control; how Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975) and Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987) or Kindred (1979) place women in time-traveling plots; how Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) invent the Internet, Second Life, and our attitudes towards virtual worlds; and how Bruce Sterling and Gibson’s The Difference Engine (1991) and Richard Powers Galatea 2.2 (1995) offer sci fi narratives where thinking man confronts thinking machine. Expect lots of reading, weekly reading responses, and two longer papers.