Time Schedule:
Ronald Thomas Foster
ENGL 556
Seattle Campus
Class description
The Theory and Literature of Post-Industrialism and Network Societies
The central question of this course will be the relation between postmodernity, defined as large changes at the social, political and economic levels that challenge aspects of modernity, and postmodernism, at the cultural level: how do these large changes register in literature? The focus will be on literary texts that are explicitly in dialogue with accounts or ideologies of postmodernity and which raise the question of what kind of critical distance or relative autonomy there is, anymore, between historical or socioeconomic context and cultural text (a problem Charles Altieri has raised). We will do some readings that address the relation between postmodernity and postmodernism directly (possibly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer [as context], Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paul Gilroy) and some more historical readings on late capitalism or post-industrial society (Daniel Bell, Ernst Mandel) that track the emergence of these terms and their transformation into a discourse on information economies and network societies (Manuel Castells, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Yochai Benkler).
We will begin with some readings on the speculative origins of the discourse on post-industrial society, in sociology (Daniel Bell’s sociological “forecasting�) and more popular forms of futurism (Toffler), along with the Marxist response to these discourses (Mandel). We will go on to track how these terms and speculations informed theories of postmodernity and postmodernism, as well as the development of technoculture studies. Throughout the quarter, we will read fairly extensively in two books I have ordered for the class, Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity and Dyer-Withford’s Cyber-Marx. The literary examples will primarily be drawn from science fiction; cyberpunk science fiction writers have explicitly acknowledge the influence of works like Toffler's on the sociological imagination that informs the speculative "world-building" within this kind of fiction. We will read some short stories along with the opening critical and theoretical materials, including selections from Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild and George Saunders’s Civilwarland in Bad Decline, along with stories on electronic reserve by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Maureen McHugh, and Nalo Hopkinson. We then go on to read five novels: Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash; Geoff Ryman, Air; Bruce Sterling, Distraction; and Charles Stross, Halting State.
There will be some shorter, informal writing assignments and at least one in-class presentation, but the main assignment for the course will be one final essay, along with a prospectus for that essay, which will be due earlier in the quarter.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
