IN 374 - Topics in Interdisciplinary Studies: Imaginary Places, Imagined Futures

Course Description

"Rotating topics explore interdisciplinary fields such as European studies, women's and gender studies, and urban studies/civic engagement. May be repeated for credit if topic varies."

Summer 2024:

Section 009: Transmedia Multiplatform Storytelling

Our new information age, with social media’s onslaught, has unpenned our previous concept of genre. The stories move back and forth between Twitter, YouTube, blogs, and Facebook. We have Twitter plays, video game dramas, interactive fiction writing, multisite operas, and immersive theatre, to mention just few. With new technologies and new genres, transmedia storytelling has also developed new questions: how are we to analyze, think critically, and tell stories that use multiple structural frameworks?

Section 008: Imaginary Places, Imagined Futures

In this course, we will explore the ways in which spaces, places, our pasts, our collective futures, and alternative versions of our present are imagined in four contemporary speculative fiction novels: The City and the City (2009) by China Miéville; Famous Men Who Never Lived (2021) by K. Chess; The Space Between Worlds (2021) by Micaiah Johnson; and The Wake (2015) by Paul Kingsnorth. Alongside our reading of fiction, we'll touch on some areas of critical theory, especially what Timothy Morton has termed "dark ecologies," but also other perspectives on topics like political sovereignty, race, and posthumanism.