Imagining futures / Science fiction

Teacher: Sara Doke

This course focuses on the future as imagined by science fiction and other speculative literature and speculative cultures since the early 20th century. On the one hand, it will pay attention to the scientific scientific, political and cultural contexts from which particular visions of the future have emerged; on the other, it will develop a global sense of the cultures of the imaginary as a genre. as a genre. Different analytical paradigms can be deployed (formalist, Marxist, feminist, etc.) can be deployed to apprehend the issues and strategies involved in imagining utopian worlds.

It will also highlight the movements that have the articulation of imaginary tropes (space conquest, AI, post-apo, time travel, science without consciousness, biological transformations uchronies...) such as afro-futurism, cyberpunk, biopunk, new weird etc. Attention attention will also be paid to other statements of the imaginary in non-Western contexts: South American and African magic realism, marvels and dystopias from the Arab world or Indian subcontinent. The course will also consider how the Imaginary contributes to other articulations of class, gender, race and interspecies social relations and, more generally, another way of thinking about Alterity.

Finally, the course will not be limited to literary SF, but will also study other media, such as cinema, radio, graphic narration, video games, etc.