UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MACERATA
STUDIUMANISTICI: DIPARTIMENTODI LINGUE, MEDIAZIONE, STORIA, LETTERE, FILOSOFIA
Anno accademico 2012-2013 VALERIO MASSIMO DE ANGELIS
LETTERATURA E CULTURA ANGLOAMERICANA 2M (Laurea magistrale: 6 CFU, 30 ore)
IN OTHER WOR(L)DS:
ALTERNATIVE REALITIES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION
OBIETTIVI FORMATIVI ITALIANO
Il corso intende mettere in luce come alcuni (sotto-)generi della letteratura fantascientifica angloamericana contemporanea propongano immagini alternative della realtà storica o della civiltà umana tout court al fine di sollevare domande cruciali sul significato dell’esperienza storica non solo americana, sui modi in cui questo significato è stato costruito dall’ideologia dominante, e sulle possibilità di immaginare diverse configurazioni socio-economiche, politiche e culturali.
ENGLISH
The course will try to highlight how some (sub-)genres of contemporary Anglo-American science fiction create alternative images of historical reality or even human civilization itself, in order to raise crucial questions about the meaning of (not only American) historical experience, the ways this meaning has been construed by dominant ideology, and the possibility to imagine different socio-economic, political and cultural configurations.
CONTENTS/PROGRAM
The course will study the way different historical realities have been imagined in contemporary Anglo-American literature different, and will examine three (sub-)genres of science fiction – ucronia, time journey and fantasy.
Ucronia, the representation of a counterfactual alternative historical development, different from the one we all know due to some deviation in the past, will be studied by reading the seminal The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick: in a post-WWII world dominated by Nazi Germany and Japan, the most dangerous strategy of resistance is paradoxically that of a writer who imagines another alternate history, where the war was has been won by the Allies.
Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) will be analyzed as an example of time journey: the novel’s main character, a would-be African American writer, is inexplicably and repeatedly sent back, from 1976 United States, to the past of slavery, and is forced to revise all her certainties about not only the historical meaning of slavery as such, but also the forms of resistance or (apparent) acquiescence the African American community used to face it.
For fantasy (that is, the invention of a universe where human civilization has taken both in ontological and epistemological terms, a totally different route, dominated by the forces of magic instead of science), Stephen King’s The Dark Tower (2004) will be read in order to highlight how the possibility to build up a narrative world with the utmost freedom, too often renounced by authors who have preferred to obey to easy and repetitive formulas based on the superficial struggle between good and evil, here allows the writer to project on a fantastically medieval-like stage the conflicts affecting (post-)modernity, somehow managing to reveal their “antiquity”.
Students are requested to present a critical essay on one or more of the three novels, to be discussed at the end of the course.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY TEXTS
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, any edition (the Library of Pal. Ugolini owns the Library of America edition, in Four Novels of the 1960s, New York, 2007)
Octavia Butler, Kindred, any edition
Stephen King, The Dark Tower. Vol. VII: The Dark Tower, any edition
SECONDARY TEXTS
Karen Hellekson, The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Kent State University Press, Kent, 2001, pp. 1-31 (Library of Pal. Ugolini; copy available at the beginning of October)
Angelyn Mitchell, The Freedom to Remember: Narrative, Slavery, and Gender in Contemporary Black Women’s Fiction, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick (NJ), 2002 (excerpts will be available at the beginning of October)
Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown (CT), 2007 (excerpts will be available at the beginning of October)
Further readings
For The Man in the High Castle:
Karen Hellekson, “Narrative, Temporality, and Historicity in The Man in the High Castle,” in The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time, Kent State University Press, Kent, 2001, pp. 62-75 (Library of Pal. Ugolini; copy available at the beginning of October)
Umberto Rossi, “Obscure Admixtures: The Man in the High Castle Considered as a (Cold) War Novel,” in Umberto Rossi, The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels, McFarland, Jefferson (NC), 2011, pp. 78-95 (copy available at the beginning of October)
For Kindred:
“‘Do I Look like Someone You Can Come Home to from Where You May Be Going?’: Re-Mapping Interracial Anxiety in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” African American Review, 41 (1), 2007, pp. 143-164 (copy available at the beginning of October)
Marc Steinberg, “Inverting History in Octavia Butler’s Postmodern Slave Narrative”, African American Review, 38 (3), 2044, pp. 467-476 (copy available at the beginning of October)
For The Dark Tower: texts will be available at the beginning of October
