Topics in AMCS: The End of All Things: Colonizing the Future

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 301T

Contemporary American pop culture provides many vivid end-of-the-world scenarios featuring familiar themes of killer robots, AI gone wild, wasted landscapes of apocalyptic ruin, dystopias of oppression and individual denigration-you know, bad things. But this library also contains a long history of utopian visions that generally arc away from cataclysm and toward the perfected ideals of cooperative social and political beneficence brought about, at least in part, by technological innovation. No matter the flavor, these narratives imagine futures near and far as spaces of radical departure from contemporary contexts where creators experiment with critiques of culture, power, social construction, and morality. We'll study the long history of popular narratives colonizing tomorrowland as pacified, harmonious societies and as the location of dehumanization and destruction-sometimes both. Our texts will range from the early 19th century to our current moment and will take many forms including short stories, novels, films, stage plays, graphic novels, and youtube channels. We'll examine their plots, devices, and the historical construction of the genres they participate in, while also interrogating how each operate as cultural objects exploring political, theological, social, racial, and feminist anxieties of their time. To this we'll consider how technology, technocracy, and the figurement of the machine construct the outcomes of both demise and salvation-or, how the future is the text onto which the present is fought for.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU BA; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Section 01

Topics in AMCS:
INSTRUCTOR: Walsh
View Course Listing - SP2024