ENGL 758D The Speculative Situation
For more than a generation now, literary and cultural studies have operated amid the horizon of a historical turn—a sweeping deference to the almost palpable specificity of an acknowledged past, this deference governing projects across all major genres and periods. Increasingly, however, we see signs of what a 2011 volume of Continental philosophy named the speculative turn—or better, perhaps, acknowledging the Latin root speculat- (“to observe from a vantage point”), a speculative situation. Yet that situation is not one of philosophy only. “Speculation” is widely (if nebulously) understood as the root cause of the turmoil in the global financial markets of 2008. The speculative equally calls into view the data-driven forecasting whose scenarios of what-might-be have come to inform our daily experience of everything from the outcomes of elections to tomorrow’s weather. In literature, meanwhile, speculative fiction has emerged to name an increasingly prominent mode of writing that encompasses aspects of science fiction, environmentalism, and political and social critique.
To constitute or construe this speculative situation for ourselves we will initially read deeply into the new speculative realist philosophy and accompanying—sometimes antagonizing—discourses such as the New Materialism, vitalism, feminist science studies, and object-oriented ontology. This reading will take up roughly the first half of the course. We will then look at a sampling of speculative fiction, including Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, as well as selections from popular non-fiction works like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. And we will revisit the financial speculation of a decade ago and consider the politics of occupying its aftermath. Other key authors (roughly in order of appearance) will include Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Tim Morton, Steve Shaviro, Ian Bogost, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed, Rebekah Sheldon, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Fredric Jameson, Alexis Lothian, Kari Kraus, Andrew Blum, J. R. Carpenter, Katherine Hayles, Nick Srnicek, Benjamin Bratton, and the anonymous collective known as Uncertain Commons, among others, as well as Kant, Heidegger, and Deleuze and Guattari.
Throughout we will seek to foster awareness of the non-inevitability of the historical turn in literary and cultural studies, while also asking what is at stake in the current project of the speculative. History, nature, systems (and networks), and worlding will all be constant themes, as will what possibilities remain for acting, or simply living. The course should therefore be of interest to those working in any historical period, and to all citizens of a world that is still—however tenuously—with us.
