The third major writing assignment for our course will showcase your skills with close textual analysis and creative writing. Please write a piece of speculative fiction that has a thesis based on either Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” Michel Foucault’s “Panopticism,” Chris Marker’s “La Jetee,” Adrienne Maree brown’s “Emergent Strategy” or Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild.”
How do hypothetical situations and metaphors shed light on the most uncomfortable, ugly, yet urgent aspects of human nature? What do we self-censor in our fiction that can be freed upon the introduction of fantastical elements? How do we make sense of the bigger picture by telling stories? For this assignment, you will write a five-page story that has its basis in the problem that one of the texts listed above is trying to solve. Your task is to expound upon the problem by writing fiction.
For example, you may choose to expand upon the supposition that machines are sentient that Donna Haraway presents in “A Cyborg Manifesto.” You might do this by writing a short story about a person who realizes that their coffee maker is communicating with them and the implications of such a fantastic occurrence. The intent of this assignment is to encourage you in flexing your creative and critical thinking. Your story should be at least 5 full pages of prose. You should engage your reader’s attention with an introduction that paints a broad stroke of your theme/argument.
This short story should be free of grammatical errors. The body of your story must employ topic sentences, transitions, and a high-caliber analysis of the texts. The work should conclude with an epilogue that explains which text or film you based your short story on, and what you were hoping to explore with it.
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