This seminar will ask you to consider stories not just entertainment or moral instruction, but as models of survival, joy, and personhood in a complex future. Frameworks of Ecocriticism, political activism, and narrative technique will inform our central texts - Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Richard Powers's Overstory. The questions of our texts will be the questions of our course: in a fraying world, how might we imagine new ways of living, being, and thriving?
3 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit · GER: WAY-A-II
This seminar will ask you to consider stories not just entertainment or moral instruction, but as models of survival, joy, and personhood in a complex future. Frameworks of Ecocriticism, political activism, and narrative technique will inform our central texts - Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and Richard Powers's Overstory. The questions of our texts will be the questions of our course: in a fraying world, how might we imagine new ways of living, being, and thriving?
Offered in Spring 2027 at Stanford University.