Teaching Sci-Fi Stories
in a College Lit Class
Until
recently, I was a graduate student who taught English at a large public
university in the American South (I won’t name it, because of what I’m about to
write in the next sentence, and because I’m paranoid). After two years of
teaching freshman composition (which is just about the most dry, boring,
futile, and demoralizing job one could hope for), I had a chance to teach
Introduction to Fiction. Yay! Fiction! My passion in life, my favorite
avocation, the whole reason I went to grad school in the first place. Now I
would finally be able to inculcate the younger generation in the love of fancy
prose and made-up stories.
We
had a big anthology for a textbook, the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, with
hundreds of short stories representing the whole world’s literary traditions
(all translated into English, of course). I tried to organize my syllabus
thematically, starting with classic “literary” workshop-style short stories by
the likes of Carver, Cheever, Updike, then moving on to some older European and
American stuff, and bridging into Halloween (it was a fall course) by means of
Kafka and Poe. Finally, I did science fiction, and some experimental stories by
Borges, Cortazar, and Nabokov.
The
experimental stuff was a mixed bag, some of it too difficult for my
sophomores...but the sci-fi ones went over like gangbusters, which pleased me
to no end because this was the genre that had gotten me into literature to
begin with. I don’t know if “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson counts as science
fiction. I suppose it does. In any case, it’s eerie, an alternate-reality story
with a lot to say about our real world, like all the best speculative work. The
horror stuff went over big (who doesn’t like Poe, you know?) but here, as with
Jackson, a problem I hadn’t considered was that they’d mostly read “Fall of the
House of Usher” already in high school.
“The
Enormous Radio” by John Cheever could technically be considered sci-fi, though
to explain why might be a bit of a spoiler (hint: the title object). You should
check it out yourselves for an example of very restrained, realistic fiction
about technology.
The
biggest reaction the class had to any story was to “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury,
the famous and colorful sci-fi chiller about children doing unspeakable things
with their virtual-reality simulator. The class immediately drew the connection
with their own electronic upbringings and it was kind of amazing how much the
story’s concerns hadn’t dated. We also watched two Bradbury-related YouTube
videos on the projector screen: one a great documentary/interview on the
(voluble, affable, charismatic) writer and his career, and one a fairly
inappropriate music video by a fan entitled “F--- Me, Ray Bradbury,” which had
them laughing uproariously and chattering all the way out the door.
It
was the best class we’d had all semester. This year, when Bradbury died, I
thought, what a testament to a writer and a human being that his work still had
this kind of impact on kids and adults over half a century later. I felt the
same way recently when they named Curiosity’s landing site on Mars after him.
Bradbury may be dead, but the spirit of science fiction is alive and well. May
it live on into the future and beyond the solar system.
Maria
Rainier fell in love with blogging before it was cool, and now she's lucky
enough to make a living out of it. She generally writes about subjects related
to online education, including for onlinedegrees.org,
where she expounds on universities that offer competitive online associate
degrees and online bachelor's degrees for the 21st century college student.
Please share your comments with her!
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