3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

In this course, we will explore the intersections of American literature, broadly conceived, and eugenics. Defined as the “[pseudo]science of racial improvement,” eugenics gained global traction amongst scientists, physicians, politicians (both liberal and conservative), intellectuals, writers, and the general public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Engaging genres such as horror, sci-fi, utopian and dystopian fiction, and textual mediums such as novels, poetry, television, and film from the US, Mexico, and Canada, we will thus consider how social and cultural ideas shape scientific practice and how scientific ideas inform literary and cultural imaginaries. At the same time, we will be paying special attention to how these literary and cultural texts affirm, critique, revise, or conjure futures beyond the horrors of eugenics and its destructive politics of exclusion. Considering, then, the many genealogies of eugenics, we will supplement our primary readings with excerpts of texts that shaped the makings of eugenics, legitimated it as an interdisciplinary scientific field, and that later served as springboards for the implementation of eugenic policy. Further, we will engage relevant scholarship in the fields of anthropology, history of science and medicine, sociology, science and technology studies, and the medical humanities. Through these and other readings, we will critically survey the lingering legacies of eugenic thought and how they inform contemporary questions of classification, “fit” and “unfit” bodies, death and dying, illness and health, and social identity (ex. class, disability, gender, race, and sexuality).