Fall semestser, 1995

 

English 5334:
20th-Century Speculative Fiction


How has American and European speculative fiction evolved in the 20th century? How have changes in literary history and critical theory affected this evolution? We will map some answers to these questions as we range from early 20th-century British Scientific Romances through American SF's early days as "scientifiction" through the "Golden Age" of the 30s-50s and the "New Wave" of the 60s-70s, a journey punctuated with glimpses at British and European SF, where the "ghettoization" of SF so familiar to American readers never occurred. Our main theme this semester will be the (re)formations of identities in speculative fictions.

Virginia Tech's Newman Library's Special Collection has a large, and largely unexplored collection of popular SF magazines in the William J. Heron Collection which will serve as one important resource for research, particularly through the Virginia Tech Online Speculative Fiction Project, VTSF.

Students will also be invited to explore other resources of the Internet in their research, to build hyper-documents, and to use the net environment as part of their semester's work. Course projects may range from an annotated hypertext catalogue of the Heron SF magazine collection (as a collective effort), to team presentations on the history of SF in the period, and a term project (essay, hyper-text, or possibly the beginnings of a scholarly edition of an important SF text); see the Your Work section for greater detail.

Our trail will also take us through the ongoing theoretical and commentative conversation about these texts and issues, in some cases through virtual conversations with the writers and scholars.

Mail questions about the course to Len Hatfield