Revelations and Visions: Literature and Prophecy from Scripture to Cyberpunk

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

From Hebrew Scripture to modern science fiction and horror, prophecy has long served as an incredibly powerful mode of literary expression, often grappling with questions of divine authority, historical and/or personal crises, political intrigue, and the boundaries of human knowledge. The seductive authority of prophetic speech—its claims to types of certainty, inevitability, and divine warrant—can obscure competing motives that blur the boundaries between revelation, persuasion, and spectacle. At the same time, the seeming anarchy of prophetic forms can be deployed to resist typical aesthetic models and produce revolutionary and/or rupturing ideas. In this course, we will explore these ideas and others at the intersections of literature and prophecy, examining how prophetic voices and writings (whether sacred, political, or poetic) challenge conventional notions of truth, time, types of knowing, and authorship. We will read texts spanning multiple genres and historical periods, including excerpts from Hebrew Scripture, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Kafka, Ballard, Kōbō Abe, Borges, Morrison, Gibson, Le Guin, Butler, Chiang, Cadigan, Danielewski, VanderMeer, and Samuel R. Delany. Alongside primary texts, we will also engage with critical theories regarding prophecy, voice, reception, and affect in order to consider how literature appropriates, imitates, subverts, and (re-)creates prophetic authority. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify how prophetic modes negotiate truth, time, and authorship; trace the material infrastructures that enable or constrain prophetic voices; distinguish between teleological “fulfillment” models and open, affective, or probabilistic ones; and critique the politics of inspiration as it moves between sacred text, rhetoric, and popular culture. In short, we will investigate how prophetic discourse has shaped literary production and traditions, and how writers have both exploited and contested the risks and promises of speaking in the name of divinity and the future.