Lab Lit, Weird Science, and Speculative Fiction

Catalog description

This course will focus on literary fiction and film about science, scientists, and scientific culture. We’ll ask how and why writers have wanted to represent the sciences and how their work is inspired, in turn, by innovations in scientific knowledge of their time. This is not a class on genre fiction. Unlike a science fiction class, we will cover narratives in a variety of genres—some highly speculative, and some in a more realist vein—thinking about how literary form is related to content. We start with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, often considered the first work of science fiction, before moving to works from across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including H.G. Welles’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, George Schulyer’s Black No More, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Carl Sagan’s Contact, Richard Powers’s Overstory, and the short stories of Ted Chiang. We will also watch such films as James Whale’s Frankenstein, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, and Yorgos Lanthemos’s Poor Things. In addition to asking how science and scientists are represented in these narratives, we’ll also discuss the cultural impact of such scientific innovations as the discovery of electricity, cell theory, eugenics and racial science, vaccines and immunology, space travel, new reproductive technologies, gene editing and more. A STEM background is not required, but students will be expected to have curiosity and motivation to learn about science, as well as its narrative representation