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This course is an undergraduate Literature upper-division elective course to be taught in 2022-23. The development of this course was supported by the Literature Department Teaching Fellowship 2022-23. The Department regards these Teaching Fellowships as an opportunity to expand its offerings and / or approaches to material.
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Course Description
Critical approaches: Media (M), Genres (R), Geographies (G)
This course approaches U.S. American speculative / science fiction (and science facts) with an open ear. The future is often imagined visually. Images of domed cities back-lit with purple skies and multiple suns or moons proliferate, yet future and other worlds are equally constructed and imagined through sound or the auditory. This class explores how Americans have imagined new or other worlds and their relationship to them through sound or sound practices. The course broadly moves from earthbound to extra-terrestrial sounds and back.
The course samples the multiplicity of sounds and sound practices in sf as a means of providing an introduction to sound study as a critical approach to genre and literary study more broadly. The course is organized around keywords in sound, including sound technologies, key sounds, and sound practices such as voice, radio, electronics, acoustics, music, language, space, transduction, and noise. It teaches strategies for identifying, analyzing, and writing about sounds that students can carry with them as tools for future work across genres and disciplines. The course will relate sound to movements in American literature, like Afrofuturism. It will shift from Afrofuturism to technologies of sound / mind / body in 1950s science fiction films; trace musical journeys through space from Sun Ra to the Voyager Golden Record back to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico; and, finally, the course makes space for sounds, identities, and / or genres not yet represented in the course.
This course primarily asks participants to consider
This course approaches U.S. American speculative / science fiction (and science facts) with an open ear. The future is often imagined visually. Images of domed cities back-lit with purple skies and multiple suns or moons proliferate, yet future and other worlds are equally constructed and imagined through sound or the auditory. This class explores how Americans have imagined new or other worlds and their relationship to them through sound or sound practices. The course broadly moves from earthbound to extra-terrestrial sounds and back.
The course samples the multiplicity of sounds and sound practices in sf as a means of providing an introduction to sound study as a critical approach to genre and literary study more broadly. The course is organized around keywords in sound, including sound technologies, key sounds, and sound practices such as voice, radio, electronics, acoustics, music, language, space, transduction, and noise. It teaches strategies for identifying, analyzing, and writing about sounds that students can carry with them as tools for future work across genres and disciplines. The course will relate sound to movements in American literature, like Afrofuturism. It will shift from Afrofuturism to technologies of sound / mind / body in 1950s science fiction films; trace musical journeys through space from Sun Ra to the Voyager Golden Record back to the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico; and, finally, the course makes space for sounds, identities, and / or genres not yet represented in the course.
This course primarily asks participants to consider
- How do we read / listen to the future or other worlds as sonically charged?
- What have future and other worlds sounded like in American literature and why?
- What do sounds do or make possible in imagined futures or worlds?
- What do sounds of imagined futures and worlds have to do with historical events?
- Who and what gets represented through sounds and how do they make meaning?