Speculative Fiction Portal (List View)

This is the Landing Page for Dr. Koke Saavedra's two-module series, Imagination Unhinged at the End of the World: Module 1 explores the rich Chilean Gothic, where, amidst sublime, disquieting and disjointed physical and cultural landscapes, Poe and Lovecraft continue exerting much influence. Famous works, like The Shrouded Woman by María Luisa Bombal, coexist with many unknown jewels. Given Chile’s extreme and vast geography, and persistent ‘frontier culture’, fantastic ‘lost cities’ and ‘lost worlds’ adventures have abounded here. We will look at local classics of this fun, gripping subgenre. Module 2 explores how, under dictatorship, Chilean SFF creation mainly moved abroad, together with its exiled creators, such as Isabel Allende, and her The House of Spirits. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Note: Students can jump in at any month/part of the Series. There are no prerequisites. [show less]

Note: Although this is a two-part series, each module stands on its own. Students are welcome to join in for any module of the series. •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Surely life at the world's end will unhinge your imagination! See by yourself by exploring the extraordinary, diverse science fiction and fantasy (SFF) of Chile, a remote land barely hanging at the edge of our planet. Boasting a grand literary tradition, and literally zero interest in hard science, Chilean SFF is different, opening unusual vistas into the imaginative landscape. In the first part of this two-module series, we will first explore the rich Chilean Gothic, where, amidst sublime, disquieting and disjointed physical and cultural landscapes, Poe and Lovecraft continue exerting much influence. Famous works, like The Shrouded Woman by María Luisa Bombal, coexist with many unknown jewels. Given Chile’s extreme and vast geography, and persistent ‘frontier culture’, fantastic ‘lost cities’ and ‘lost worlds’ adventures have abounded here. We will look at local classics of this fun, gripping subgenre. After losing ourselves on remote places in search of treasure and immortality, we will explore the incisive ‘New Wave’ feminist SFF of the Chilean sixties—in particular Elena Aldunate and Ilda Cádiz Ávila, two remarkable authors whose influence grows every year as female voices are rediscovered and empowered. Perhaps a cautionary tale, Chilean proud 150-year-old democracy burned and crashed on 9/11/1973. Chile has also produced remarkable SFF comics, creatively expressing (or repressing) changing local moods. We will explore exciting works, little known in the US, including the adventures of Mampato and the extraordinary Guardians of the South, a decolonizing comics depicting indigenous Mapuche as superheroes, precisely at a time of their political uprising. Part 1 – Outline: Lecture 1: Poe & Lovecraft in the South Pacific: At the real mountains of madness' and other awesomely disquieting Gothic stuff. Discussion 1: Class discussion on Lecture 1 material. Lecture 2: Lost Worlds and Fantastic Cities Aplenty: Why not just grab some horses and go in search of eternal life and gold by the bucketfuls in the foreboding Andes and the forbidding Patagonian fiords? Discussion 2: Class discussion on Lecture 2 material. Lecture 3: Forget Neruda! The amazing feminist 'New Wave' sixties science fiction of Isabel Aldunate and Ilda Cádiz Ávila. Discussion 3: Class discussion on Lecture 3 material. Lecture 4: Top comics in the Andes: From time-traveling Mampato and Jodorowsky’s Incal to the decolonizing, native Mapuche superheroes, The Guardians of the South. Discussion 4: Class discussion on Lecture 4 material. [show less]

Surely life at the world's end will unhinge your imagination! See by yourself by exploring the extraordinary, diverse science fiction & fantasy (SFF) of Chile, a remote land barely hanging at the edge of our planet. Boasting a grand literary tradition, and literally zero interest in hard science, Chilean SFF is different, opening unusual vistas into the imaginative landscape. In the second part of this two-module series, we will explore how, under dictatorship, Chilean SFF creation mainly moved abroad, together with its exiled creators, such as Isabel Allende, and her The House of Spirits. Since the return to democracy in 1990, Chilean SFF has been shaped by profound, historically unresolved social conflicts, such as colonial and patriarchal legacies, an ambiguous relationship with technology, persisting ‘classism’ and socio-economic inequalities, and the lingering traumas of the military regime. Post-humanist SF, Cyber- and Steam-Punk, have taken strong roots in Chile by addressing those old conflicts in impactful literary works, such as Alicia Fenieux’s Clone’s Love or Muñoz Valenzuela’s Flowers for a Cyborg. A decade of massive foreign immigration, of over 10% of the national population, compounded social tensions. And the optimism that followed redemocratization and lightning-fast economic growth ended abruptly in 2019 with a dramatic ‘social explosion’, where millions of people took to the streets after a minor rise in the cost of public transportation. Remarkably, SFF is thriving under these unsettling social conditions, as Chilean SFF authors alchemically transform the new anxieties into extraordinary imaginative creations. A true Chilean Golden Age of SFF is being born as zombies and other dreadful creatures run rampant. Inspired, though dystopian social visions combine with technological nightmares to create some of the best imaginative literature ever created in the country. Lastly, we will look at the Cyber-Shamanism of Jorge Baradit—Magic Realism 2.0?—an inspired, neo-techno-Gothic expression of the ‘new pessimism’, mixing Cyber-Punk and indigenous spirituality to express the new fears arising from the expansion of organized crime, violence and corruption, threatening social dissolution not only in Chile but in the Americas as a whole. Although this is a two-part series, each module stands on its own. Lecture 1: Magic Realism & real dictatorship: Isabel Allende’s 'The House of Spirits' & other potent exiled imaginations. Discussion 1: Class discussion on Lecture 1 material. Lecture 2: Posthumanism's alive & well in the South Pacific: From cyborg social justice revenge to clones’ love betrayals. Discussion 2: Class discussion on Lecture 2 material. Lecture 3: Chilean zombie attacks, vampires on the lose, & other easily preventable catastrophes: Pop goes the future! Discussion 3: Class discussion on Lecture 3 material. Lecture 4: A pessimist Golden Age and Magic Realism 2.0? Cyber-Punk, Cyber-Shamanism & Jorge Baradit's “Magical Conquest of America”. Discussion 4: Class discussion on Lecture 4 material. [show less]

This course will be offered for the first time this October 2023 (Anne’s favourite month) Within weeks of its 1908 publication, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables became a bestseller. Over the years, this charming orphan story put Montgomery and her imaginative Prince Edward Island on a global map. Despite the fact that Anne of Green Gables is Canada’s bestselling novel throughout the world—or because of it—Montgomery was ignored by the literati and scholarship. Montgomery was a public intellectual, the first female Canadian fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and invested Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Still she was dismissed as “just” a children’s writer, a regionalist, or a woman. It was 25 years after Montgomery’s death before children’s literature and feminist scholars began to recover her work as worthy of study. While there is a robust field of Montgomery scholarship, there are areas where our focus is sometimes too narrow. One of these is the category of “realistic” fiction. While there is a kind of verisimilitude about everyday life in the late Victorian era in her work, the realism is pressed to the margins of definition as Montgomery romanticizes the worlds she creates. And can we disagree that there is something magical about Anne herself? By changing our way of approach and by looking at Anne of Green Gables as a fantasy novel, what can we unveil in this classic novel? Native Prince Edward Islander and Montgomery scholar Brenton Dickieson will lead students through a rereading of Anne of Green Gables using the lenses we use to study fantasy and speculative fiction with the goal of allowing one of the greatest living children’s books to live in new ways. [show less]