ELIT 467 Futurism in British Fiction

British speculative fiction as a lens on how societies imagine, fear, and rehearse their futures. Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and Lewis become case studies in how time travel, dystopia, and space voyages stage anxieties about science, politics, and human nature. Expect heavy weekly novel reading, in-class discussion of critical approaches to futurism, one midterm, and a take-home final that asks you to argue rather than summarize. It pairs well with the department's other 20th-century and theory courses, and earns its keep by giving you a vocabulary for extrapolation and dystopia that's surprisingly useful far beyond literature seminars.