Blast Course: “Science and Utopian Fiction”

BLAST COURSES IN THE HUMANITIES (from AGHI on Hopkins@Home)

Course Title: “Science and Utopian Fiction"

Dates: Tuesdays/Fridays from July 13th through August 14th (5 weeks)

Class Type: 2 recorded videos per week (with one live group meeting TBD)

Course Description: Faster-than-light travel, cloning, nanotechnology, and the colonization of outer space: this course introduces students to science and utopian fiction as a literature of ideas. The course will sample two utopian novels that imagine future worlds and the human beings who inhabit them: Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, a proto-Afrofuturist story which challenges colonial history and inspired Marvel’s Wakanda, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “ambiguous Utopia,” the 1974 novel The Dispossessed. Along the way, the course will consider the history of the genre and the wider social significance of technology, literary form, and human imagination.

Open to the public