3.0

credits

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This course will introduce students to a range of literary expressions of labor, political struggle and historical change, focusing on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth- centuries. This course moves through late-nineteenth century fictional representations of labor struggles and communal imaginaries, the racialized and classed struggles of the Reconstruction era, and artistic engagement with the Left during the Great Depression, and concludes with two works of speculative fiction from the late twentieth century. We will question how a range of authors deal with political commitment, historical representation, and utopian imagination. The course will highlight scholarship that questions how histories of U.S. racial formation – particularly focusing on the enslavement of Black Americans and the dispossession of Native Americans – are entwined with the literary and political imaginations of authors of social fiction.