skip to main content
Hum/En 37
Welcome to Dystopia
9 units (3-0-6)  | first
This course surveys a number of literary destinations you would never want to visit in real life: places with near-unsurmountable political and environmental threats where individuality is crushed and where happy endings are hard to come by. Given that life in a dystopia is so awful, what makes this genre of fiction so popular? And what can fictional dystopian societies teach us about our own? We will look for answers to these questions in the work of some of the greatest writers of the past century, including Franz Kafka, Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick, Cormac McCarthy, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others.
Instructor: Holland