ENGL 103
Ruined America Fall 2015
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

The course will focus on contemporary dystopian novels about America. We will try to understand the heightened anxiety about apocalypse, and the ethical dilemmas imposed by prospect of our diminished state. We will also consider issues of class, environment, technology, divisions of race and gender, and the projections of anarchy and political oppression. Among the kinds of dystopias considered: counter-factual histories which present a dystopian past that we have fortuitously averted; works that portray the present as dystopian; and of course visions of a dystopian future, including visions of a post-apocalyptic world, and those that extrapolate broken societies out of an assessment of current evils. We will read works by Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillio, Paul Auster, Chang-Rae Lee, Philip Roth, Jim Crace, Chuck Palahniuk, among others.