evening redness

Here are the materials for my Spring 2013 course on “The Nigh Fantastic.” This course is part of CU English’s Modern and Contemporary Literature for Non-majors offerings.

I had wanted to teach Cloud Atlas and The City and the City for a while and finally found a way to do so. The premise here is that none of these texts are straight SF or fantasy works (with the possible exception of Oryx and Crake). Rather, all of them make use of SF and fantasy conventions in the service of something else. The City and the City is a work of detective fiction, but the impossibility of the two cities in question and certain technologies present within them push towards fantasy and SF respectively without turning the novel into a full blown generic text. I haven not really thought deeply about the connections among these texts, so I will be interested to see what comes of this class.

The reading list, if you don’t want to click through: Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle; Butler’s The Parable of the Talents; Whitehead’s The Intuitionist; Atwood’s Oryx and Crake; Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas; Miéville’s The City and the City; Kunzru’s Gods Without Men. I also considered House of Leaves; The Road; among others that I am now forgetting.

Here are the materials:

ENGL 3660-006 & -009: The Nigh Fantastic Syllabus

ENGL 3660-006 & -009: The Nigh Fantastic Daily Schedule

ENGL 3660-006 & -009: The Nigh Fantastic Text List

This entry was posted on 7 January 2013 at 21:11 and is filed under Teaching with tags courses, fantasy, literature, science fiction, syllabi, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.