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 x 2-hour seminar per week.
The 2000 word summative essay assesses ILOs 1-3 and 5. The 3000 word summative essay assesses ILOs 1-5.
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)