Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging GenresP. L. Thomas Why did Kurt Vonnegut shun being labeled a writer of science fiction (SF)? How did Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin find themselves in a public argument about the nature of SF? This volume explores the broad category of SF as a genre, as one that challenges readers, viewers, teachers, and scholars, and then as one that is often itself challenged (as the authors in the collection do). SF, this volume acknowledges, is an enduring argument. The collected chapters include work from teachers, scholars, artists, and a wide range of SF fans, offering a powerful and unique blend of voices to scholarship about SF as well as examinations of the place for SF in the classroom. Among the chapters, discussions focus on SF within debates for and against SF, the history of SF, the tensions related to SF and other genres, the relationship between SF and science, SF novels, SF short fiction, SF film and visual forms (including TV), SF young adult fiction, SF comic books and graphic novels, and the place of SF in contemporary public discourse. The unifying thread running through the volume, as with the series, is the role of critical literacy and pedagogy, and how SF informs both as essential elements of liberatory and democratic education. |
Contents
1 | |
Challenging Genres 1 A CASE FOR SF AND SPECULATIVE FICTION An Introductory Consideration | 14 |
Challenging Genres 2 SF AND SPECULATIVE NOVELS Confronting the Science and the Fiction | 35 |
Challenging Genres 3 SF NOVELS AND SOCIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTATION Examining Real World Dynamics through Imaginative Displacem... | 58 |
Challenging Genres 4 PEELING APART LAYERS OF MEANING IN SF SHORT FICTION Inviting Students to Extrapolate on the Effects of Change | 73 |
Challenging Genres 5 READING ALIEN SUNS Using SF Film to Teach a Political Literacy of Possibility | 95 |
Challenging Genres 6 SINGULARITY CYBORGS DRONES REPLICANTS AND AVATARS Coming to Terms with the Digital Self | 118 |
Challenging Genres 7 TROUBLING NOTIONS OF REALITY IN CAPRICA Examining Paradoxical States of Being | 133 |
Challenging Genres 8 I TRY TO REMEMBER WHO I AM AND WHO I AM NOT The Subjugation of Nature and Women Represented in The Hun... | 145 |
Challenging Genres 9 ITS A BIRD ITS A PLANE ITS A COMIC BOOK IN THE CLASSROOM? Truth Red White and Black as Test Case for Teac... | 165 |
Challenging Genres 10 THE ENDURING POWER OF SF SPECULATIVE AND DYSTOPIAN FICTION Final Thoughts | 185 |
Challenging Genres AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES | 216 |
Other editions - View all
Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres Paul Lee Thomas No preview available - 2013 |
Common terms and phrases
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