Dystopian Literature

Catalog description

Dystopian stories depict a world where things are in the process of going, or have already gone, terribly wrong. Since their emergence in the late nineteenth century, the genre has been filled with worry, wonder, and warning about forces that threaten humanity, including technological disruption, rising totalitarianism, surveillance states, religious zealotry and intolerance, war and nuclear annihilation, environmental crises, economic collapse, biological catastrophe, poverty, famine, and more. Despite the direness of these imagined futures, dystopian narratives remain remarkably popular. Students in this course will explore dystopian fiction and film while examining such questions as: Why are audiences drawn to stories about the world falling apart? What connections do these dystopian narratives have to our world and lives? Are we already living in a dystopia? And do dystopian works merely trace the inevitable trajectory of a world heading toward ruin, or do they offer hope, perhaps even insights for how such dystopian futures might be avoided?