Faculty First Year Seminars 191WG2 - Handmaid's Tale: The Future?

This course challenges and reimagines alternate futures to the dystopic Margaret Atwood's 1985 novel Handmaid's Tale that presents a particularly dark vision of human futures. The novel has remained in the public eye, and recently back in the press because of the popular Hulu series of the book. Atwood has said she is writing a sequel. The novel presents a particularly dystopic view of the future, where in an increasingly unstable planet, fertility rates collapse, environmental problems take over and in order to further human reproduction, women are subjugated into new classes including Handmaids, Marthas and Wives. Alongside reading parts of the novel, the seminar will also examine and consider the rise of reproductive technologies and it has enabled and made possible new kinds of families and relations of belonging. We will examine the many assumptions of the novel- including fears of population explosion, suspicions of reproductive technology, divisions amongst human societies, the turn to apocalyptic thinking in contemporary times to reinvision new futures and possibilities for our planet.

Freshmen Only