ENG (0122) 245 - Science Fiction

Credits: 3.00

Students investigate how modern science informs science fiction, and how and why imaginative works react to science. Students will use cultural, ethical, and sociological accounts of science to analyze how literature represents, resists, and/or extends scientific thought and practice by considering race, gender, technology, and the environment.

Prerequisite 1: ENG 107
Course Learning Goals: Students will:

1. Define key concepts within the subdiscipline of “literature and science,” such as literary humanism, posthumanism, the “two cultures” debate, the environmental humanities, the social construction of scientific fact, and scientific racism.

2. Examine how these fundamental concepts apply to literary works, films, and other cultural productions.

3. Analyze how literary texts and other cultural artifacts represent, promote, revise, and/or resist scientific concepts and practices on various grounds.

4. Analyze how race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, belief, and other forms of social differentiation influence past and present institutions of science, literary study, and the divisions developed between them.

5. Formulate thesis-driven, motivated arguments supported by well-analyzed evidence.