The Illiberal Imagination: Fictions of Disinformation, Conspiracy, and Control

Catalog description

What do an artist and a politician have in common? One person might say that they both make things up. Another might claim that both aim to tell truths that unite audiences. Bearing this genre-related ambiguity in mind, this course will explore the description of illiberal and anti-progressive political ideals and systems—particularly, although not exclusively, in narrative fiction. This class is therefore also about the strategies politicians, novelists, and others use to shape our sense of what is real and to argue for particular accounts of what is valuable, just, and possible, as well as how human life should be led. We will consider the work of Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, Colleen Hoover, R.F. Kuang, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon, Ayn Rand, and the Marquis de Sade, among others, attending to the ways in