The Humanities Center Lectures, 2011-2012: Imagining Planetarity

Alien Earth: Science Fiction, Posthumanism, and The Planet

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

4:30 pm, Adamson Wing, Baker Hall 136A

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Professor of English, DePauw University, is author of The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction.

The international popularity of science fiction has made it one of the main vehicles of the social imagination of our hyper-modernizing, globalizing age. More than an artistic genre, it has become a way of thinking about things, in which contemporary concerns are projected into the future and into alien worlds. Sf is a child of the enlightenment, and reflects the Enlightenment’s drive to subject every supposedly natural category to critical reason and technological transformation. Sf artists were among the first to imagine the planet as a single thing, and humanity as a species being. Through the practice of “world reduction,” sf has produced an enormous variety of inhabited planets and simplified versions of our planet. Things may have reached a critical tipping point in our own age. Recent sf is engaged with posthumanist thought, which questions everything previous generations considered natural, including humanity and the earth itself.

For more information, please visit the Humanities Center website.