From the collapse of social order to the reimagining of technology, power, and identity, speculative and dystopian fiction allows us to confront the crises and contradictions of the present by projecting them into imagined futures. As political instability, climate emergency, technological acceleration, and social inequality increasingly shape our lived experience, speculative fiction has become one of the most vital and popular modes of cultural expression today. In this seminar, we will read two contemporary novels to examine how speculative fiction explores urgent sociopolitical and existential questions. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, ecocriticism, posthumanism, and trauma theory, we will explore themes of power, temporality, violence, displacement, identity, and resistance. Through close readings and critical discussions, we will consider how speculative fiction reflects and refracts cultural anxieties, offering complex visions of what it means to live in times of crisis and of how we might imagine alternative ways of being.

Kurs im HIS-LSF