Unit name | Presenting the Future |
---|---|
Unit code | ENGL20044 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Professor. Punter |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | Department of English |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This unit explores some of the ways in which literary texts have sought to envision the future. Selected speculative fictions from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be studied with a view to examining the possibilities of relating fictions to their historical contexts. There will be an emphasis on a continuing series of arguments about the nature and uses of technology, as well as on the concept of modernity.
The unit aims to develop understanding of the ways in which literature mediates between past, present and future. Students will be encouraged to seek connections between literary presentations of the future and the deeper structure of fears, anxieties and expectations which are encoded in the texts.
On completion of this unit, students will be expected to have deepened their understanding of how literature treats the future; they will have been encouraged to speculate on ways in which ‘imaginative writing’ actually constructs that future, in the sense that it creates a series of metaphors without which we might be unable to understand it. The topic will thus necessarily open up questions about the role literature plays in how we understand the world, relations between the literary and the ideological, and the constitutive powers of the cultural imagination.
On successful completion of this unit students will have (1) developed a detailed knowledge of modern fiction of the future; (2) developed a critical understanding of key texts; (3) acquired an understanding of major critical approaches including structuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist and Marxist approaches; (4) demonstrated their ability to analyse and compare various texts from different periods within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; (5) strengthened their skills in academic writing, argumentation, and evaluation of evidence from primary texts and critical literature.
1 x 2-hour seminar per week
One short essay of 2000 words (33.3%) and one long essay of 4000 words (66.7%). Both summative elements will assess (1) knowledge and understanding of the primary texts; (2) understanding of relevant cultural contexts, as well as (3) a range of critical approaches. The long essay will also involve (4) comparative analysis. Both essays will also test (4 and 5) students’ ability to analyse and assess competing accounts of the primary texts; their ability to adduce pertinent textual material in support of their argument; and their ability to present that argument lucidly and in accordance with academic conventions.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) J.G. Ballard, Vermilion Sands (1971) Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) Philip Cooke, Back to the Future: Modernity, Postmodernity and Locality (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990)