ENG 305U-001: Science Fiction, Course 41205
NH 241 Course time:
Grace L. Dillon, PhD; Office CH 117Q; 725-8144; dillong@pdx.edu
Office hours: MW
website: http://www.web.pdx.edu/~dillong
Course Description
and Goals:
As Gregg Rickman points out: “The world’s first science fiction
film is commonly thought to be George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon of 1902. One of hundreds of short films produced and
often starring Méliès, a magician turned filmmaker,
in 1897-1914, A Trip to the Moon
tells of a group of “scientists” (dressed in robes and wizard hats) who launch
a lunar rocket out of a cannon. Landing
in a still famous image, directly in the Moon’s eye, the explorers
gaze at a heaven made up of personified stars and planets, then encounter
hostile Moonmen from whom they barely escape.” (The Science Fiction Reader xiii and
xiv) What might constitute SF
cinema? Borrowed often for SF cinema
criticism, Kingsley Amis’s definition considers the
involvement of a “situation that could not arise in the world we know, but
which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovations in science or
technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or
extraterrestrial in origin.” (Amis 18 repeated in
Vivian Sobchack’s Screening
Space: The American Science Fiction Film 19)
Fiction
about science, and the changes that technology might
bring about, SF cinema is also about the “idea,” the imagination-stretching
cognitive estrangement along with fluidity in experimenting with special
effects or trucage. SF cinema can vary greatly from
elements such as the time travel narrative, the alien invasion tale, or stories
of genetic manipulation. As a dynamic and shape-shifting arena, SF cinema
covers technocratic utopian cinema as
early as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), 
techno-optimistic patterns of space opera,
disaster films of the 50s, adventurous
science fiction of the 1960s/early 70s era, the early 80s “tech noir cycle, films that marry SF with the
ambience of a postwar crime drama,
offering a dark vision of science and technology and their effects on humanity,
and 1990s postmodern cyborg and post-human films
adrift in time and place.This course will engage in
exploring gender, class, race, and colonial relations in a series of SF cinema, the
interplay between film and SF TV series, trucage or special effects such
as CGI effects, simulationist or technofuturist,
prosthetic or mechanical effects, since this form of cinema is often equated with the opportunity to
display and experiment more widely with trucage than in other forms of film, retrofitting and
nostalgia of the metanarrative of SF itself,
discerning more clearly the struggle between anti-technological narratives and
this “hyper-technological aesthetic,” the jouissance for “rogue fans” and
others of intertextualities, and renewed
configurations of conspiracy theory and/or hidden forces that control and
manipulate us.
In the process we will engage in
questions such as: In a SF/world politics context, in what ways do SF films
anticipate opposition politics to cyber-fascism? How do “generic hybrids” of
horror, film noir, westerns, and fantasy interact in SF cinema
with the more conventional SF
tropes? How do
globalization policies “re-appear” or are hyperamplified?
What do the spaces such as cyberspace, the postmodern city, or spaceship Earth
look like and what does this suggest about societal values and class
structures? In what ways are forms of racial hybridity
and a decentering of the Self in response
to the Other elaborated on? How is the figure of the
scientist portrayed in SF cinema? Our own “myth-reading” discussions will
include theoretical approaches, from interdisciplinary venues such as iconographic analysis, Christian Metz’s
“imaginary signifier,” Walter Benjamin’s “optic unconscious,” Darko Suvin’s “cognitive
estrangement,” Andre Bazín’s “cinematic realism, the Lacanian mirror phase, Arjun Appaduri’s mediascape, Edward Soja’s “third space,” the aesthetics of camp, Chela Sandoval’s “oppositional consciousness,” Donna Haraway’s cyborg-politics, ,
fetishism, Freud’s “the uncanny,” masculinity and gender studies, Baudrillard’s hyperreality, and
Michel de Certeau’s “textual poachers.”
Course Requirements:
Final Exam: 40%; Panel Presentation (1) and individual Panel Essay (1): 30%;
Attendance and Participation (group workshops, dialogue journal responses as
needed, audience participation for panels, or class-assigned analytical
journals to readings): 30%.
Final exam: Your
final exam will consist of three parts: a section requiring you to define key
terms with stipulative examples provided for each and
two sections requiring you to write two essays.
Panel Presentation:
You will join a generally four-five member group and collaborate on a 25-30-minute
presentation covering a specific self-directed and focused topic selected from
the general topics noted in class or a topic created based on your group’s
“rogue fan” expertise in SF cinema. There will be 8 groups, two for each
session documented in your course schedule. Start thinking
now about your preferences. You will start forming your group and
choosing your topic by the third week.
Keep in mind that you will be attaching an individual panel essay to
your final work for this project.
Dialogue Response
Journal (2-3 typed pages each): The dialogue journal response work sometimes
will be assigned at the session before the work is discussed but you should
have one dialogue journal response due by at least the end of each week. They
should be typed double-spaced 12 point font 2-3 pages long (minimum) and can
vary from analyzing critically the stories, novels, films, or essays assigned
to experimenting in a short story or film script format with the styles,
tropes, and techniques noted in the assigned readings or discussed in
connection with our films in class. These are helpful as start-ups in group
conversations and discussions so please bring your dialogue journal response
for the selected readings and session of that day and these will be collected
at the end of each session unless otherwise noted. These are also helpful
pre-writes for essay responses written for the final exam.
ATTENDANCE:
Because this class emphasizes group workshops and interactive discussions,
absences are discouraged. Each absence after the first three lowers your grade
one level. If you miss more than two weeks' worth of classes, you should
consider dropping the course and retaking it when your schedule permits. If you
arrive late or leave early, you may be counted absent for the day. Please
notify me if you must miss class for some reason. Discussions are encouraged
and analytical journals or dialogue journal responses may come up in class.
These responses will aid you in partnered discussions or quick workshops at the
beginning of the session and in synthesizing critical theoretical material. In
sorting out the meaning of each article provide your own concrete SF cinema
examples that are relevant to the areas noted for that particular session.
The Right to be
Successful: Students with
disabilities who may require accommodations are encouraged to contact the
Required Course Text: Liquid
Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader. Edited by Sean Redmond.
Supplemental Texts:
Jean Baudrillard’s
Simulacra and Simulation
M. Keith
Booker’s Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture (2006)
Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep
Dick, Philip K. Ubik.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Count
Zero or Mona Lisa Overdrive
Jan Johnson-Smith’s American Science Fiction TV: Star- Trek,
Star Gate and Beyond (2005)
Roz Kaveney’s From Alien to the Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film(2005)
Geoff
King’s and Tanya Krzywinska’s Short Cuts: Science Fiction
Cinema from Outerspace
to Cyberspace
Annette Kuhn, editor of Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary
Science
Fiction Cinema(1990 rptd. 2003.)
Annette
Kuhn, editor of Alien Zone II: The Spaces
of Science Fiction(1999)
Larry McCaffrey’s
Storming the Reality Studio
The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North
American Science Fiction, 1960-
1990. Edited by Ursula K. Le Guin
and Brian Attebery.
Norton and Company, 1993.
Plato’s Timaeus
Gregg Rickman’s edited The Science Fiction Reader(2004)
Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt, eds., Aliens R Us. (2002)
Vivian Sobchack’s
Screening Space: The
American Science Fiction Film 1980 rptd. 2004)
J.P. Telotte’s Science
Fiction Film (2001)
Andrew Utterson’s
Technology and Culture: The Film Reader(2005)
Course Schedule:
The day-to-day schedule follows. Note
that you should complete reading assignments by the day on which they are
listed. Liquid= Liquid Metal: the Science Fiction Film Reader. Edited by Sean Redmond.
WEEK ONE:
M 1/8 Introduction to course. Scripting SF cinema icons.
W 1/10
WEEK TWO:
M 1/15 HOLIDAY. Campus closed.
W 1/17 Reading: Barry Keith Grant’s “Sensuous Elaboration: Reason and the Visible in the Science Fiction Film.” (Liquid 17 ff.) Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Steve Soderbergh’s Solaris(2002) Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville(1965) referenced. The scopophilic pleasures of cinema and “the imaginary signifier.”
WEEK THREE:
M 1/22 Reading: Vivian Sobchack’s
“Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film”(Liquid 78 ff.) and Isolde
Standish’s “Akira, Postmodernism, and
Resistance” (Liquid 249 ff.) Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Rintaro’s Metropolis
(2001), Akira, New Rose Hotel, Dark City,
The City of Lost Children, Sky Captain and the World Tomorrow, and Howl’s Moving Castle. The poetics of space from
Cyberpunk to “Ray-Gun Gothic” to Steampunk to Diesel
Punk.
W 1/24 Reading: Eric Avila’s “
WEEK FOUR:
M 1/29
W 1/31
Week Five:
M 2/5 Reading: Doran Larson’s “Machine as Messiah: Cyborgs, Morphs, and the American Body Politic.” (Liquid 191 ff.) Terminator
I and II, Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, and Tank Girl. The image of the male body
and masculinity studies.
W 2/7 Panel Presentations (2).
Week Six:
M 2/12 Gattaca, 28 Days Later, Twelve Monkeys, Ultraviolet, and Code 46. Emergent forms of biogenetic engineering, reverse engineering, and infectious diseases.
W
2/14 Reading: Scott Bukatman’s
“Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of Spectacle." (Liquid 228ff.) Total Recall and Blade Runner. David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch,Videodrome, and EXistenZ. Spectacle, infection, fetishism, and technosurrealism.
Week Seven:
M 2/19 Reading: Alison Landberg’s
“Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” (Liquid 239 ff.) Blade
Runner renewed. Reality and time slippages in thrillers such as Jacob’s Ladder, as newer forms of Nokia cinema such as Run, Lola, Run and contemporary
“rewrites” in such films as Donnie Darko, The Jacket, and The Final Cut.
W 2/21 Panel Presentations (2)
Week Eight:
M 2/26 Reading: Warren Buckland’s “Between Science Fact and
Science Fiction: Spielberg’s Digital Dinosaurs, Possible Worlds and the New
Aesthetic Realism.” (Liquid
24 ff.) A Scanner Darkly, Waking Life, Minority
Report, Vanilla Sky, and Imposter. Total
Recall and The Truman Show referenced. Trucage
and digital special effects in the world of Philip K. Dick.
W 2/28 Reading: Henry Jenkins III’s
“Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” (Liquid 264 ff.) Cowboy Bebop series, the Wild,
Wild West, Firefly series, and Serenity. Rogue fans, Michel de Certeau’s textual poachers, the western space opera “overgone,” the howling wilderness, hybrid genres, and
fandom.
Week Nine:
M 3/5 Reading:
John Tulloch’s “ ‘We’re Only a Speck in the Ocean’:
The Fan as Powerless Elite.” (Liquid 281 ff.) Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood, Starship Troopers, The Fifth Element,
and The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy.
The aesthetics of camp, humour
and wit in SF cinema.
W 3/7 Panel Presentations (2)
Week Ten:
M 3/12 Reading: Steven Neale’s
“‘You’ve Got to be Fucking Kidding!’: Knowledge, Belief and Judgement
in Science Fiction.” (Liquid
11 ff) Battlestar Galactica
series. The posthuman, “cylon/human,”
and doppelganger images renewed. Adding to the grid!
W 3/14 Panel Presentations (2)
Final Exam
Schedule: Monday, March 19,