The Darkness of Tomorrow – Dystopia in Films & Series

Dystopian landscapes have gained momentum whenever a crisis grows rampantly like metastases in a cancerous body. Originally at home in science-fiction literature, each new fictional dystopia echoes the fairly true anxieties of its respective generation. The short fiction genre has always been the generic hotbed countless writers of science-fiction tales, comic books, radio broadcasts, or scripts for film- and TV series have used for their dismantling of worlds. Whereas H.P Lovecraft, John W. Campbell or Richard Matheson created post-apocalyptic scenarios to focus on the toxic impetus of human hubris, biological warfare, and the nuclear age in early- to mid-20th century, contemporary dystopias in film and TV series are characteristically indifferent about what has affected or who is to blame for the sufficient deprivation of human existence. Films like It Comes At Night (2017), Bird Box (2016) or A Quiet Place (2018) leave aside the tech-savvy aspect of earlier SciFi, but emphasize the emotional resonance of drama. In a third category, the gamification trend has sparked a bunch of ego shooting, torture-pornish franchises like The Purge or Squid Game that equipped their respective social hells with a fair amount of heavenly classicist, neoliberally utopian desires.

The seminar will take you on a journey through a literary and visual history of dystopian narratives past and present. Central questions will be what constitutes the horror in the texts? How do these visions affect our understanding of the world in a time when Trump becomes elected president, when wars of aggression are fought in Europa, when Covid-19 becomes an invisible and the global climate change a more and more obvious threat? Although the planned content sounds like anything but fun, we’ll explore the texts’ experimental language, its escapist function, and look for the narratives’ sense of hope, their potential optimism, and encouraging irony.

This course is particularly recommended for students of the Angewandte Studiengänge.

Credits will be awarded on the basis of podcast group projects, written reflections/ assignments or final exam.