Coming of Age at the End of the World
Coming of Age at the End of the World
(02) Coming of Age at the End of the World - Katharine Beutner, Department of English
Why are we experiencing a cultural moment so permeated with dystopian, post-apocalyptic themes—and why do many works with these themes feature and target teenagers? High-concept dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels have flooded the young adult market, while literary novelists writing for adults (Atwood, Mitchell, McCarthy, Ishiguro) spin similar stories. In this seminar, we will write and think broadly about genre boundaries and narrative structure, communal responses to disaster and trauma, utopian and dystopian rhetoric, the roles of speculative fiction in our culture, and the development of the notion of adolescence in America. We’ll explore what elements of the idea of the American teenager survive in books that narrate the dissolution of America or its aftermath; for comparison, we’ll also read several books set in post-apocalyptic or dystopian Britain, examine a Japanese film with interesting similarities to the popular Hunger Games series, and consider the film version of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a different sort of dystopian coming-of-age story.