Science, Fiction, Science Fiction

3–5 credits · Undergraduate

This course examines the birth of science fiction. Focused on nineteenth-century France, a laboratory of scientific innovation and literary experimentation, it explores how writers sought to capture the promises and anxieties of unprecedented technological development. From Balzac to Sand, from Flaubert to Verne, the course interrogates the complex relationship between "science" and "fiction" at a moment when both notions were simultaneously being rethought and redefined. These authors' speculative narratives will allow us to examine founding tropes of science fiction that have remained relevant to this day, such as time travel, the return to life after death, and techno-futurist dreams. Drawing on visual materials of the period (posters for traveling science shows, satirical cartoons, postcards, maps of the Universal Expositions), and on early cinema, we will ask how these authors blurred the boundaries between scientific knowledge and literary invention: how did these narratives shape the understanding of science? What anxieties about the present and the future did these works express? And why did fiction and science call upon each other?