LIT Speculative Fiction
Thematic Focuses

This course sets out to explore the complex interrelations and interactions of power, knowledge, personal identity, human-ness, technology, and what Foucault calls "the order of things" in the context of Speculative Fiction, particularly in such narratives from the last 25 years.

Perhaps the best way to to suggest the direction of our research in this richly complex domain will be through a series of suggestive questions, offered here in no particular order or precedence, but with the expectation that some or all of these will come into play in our readings in the course.

• How does technology enable or constrain social order and its operations?
  
• How are our identities--as male or female, individualistic or or socialistic, intellectual or anti-intellectual, worker or sloth, family member or outsider--'written' into us by the intersections or forces of power and knowledge?
  
• How are power and knowledge interconnected? Does this happen only "through technology"?
  
• What is "natural" and is it opposed to "technological"?
  
• What is "human"? Why is "de-humanization" nearly always regarded as a negative or evil process?
  
• What is the relationship among politics, gender, and technology?

We're looking forward to your additions to this list of questions and to our community's emerging answers-or, at least, responses to them.