Word: fiction
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...students tell their parents they’re going to Harvard to study dystopian worlds run by a race of machines. But reading novels with these sorts of themes is exactly what over a hundred undergraduates have been doing this past semester in English 182: “Science Fiction.” Under the guidance of English professor Stephen L. Burt ’94, students have delved into the works of H.G. Wells, Margaret Atwood, and Philip K. Dick as assiduously as many others have studied Milton and Shakespeare...
Burt, a poetry writer and scholar by profession, has taught such English department staples as “Modern American Poetry” and “Major British Writers II” since arriving at the university in 2007. But he is also a longtime student of science fiction. Once a childhood reader of Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Isaac Asimov, he now writes course syllabi and critical articles on the genre...
Burt first began teaching a science fiction class at Macalester College in Minnesota, where he drafted his reading list with the help of several students. He brought the course with him to Harvard and taught it for the first time in Fall...
...choice to teach science fiction was a natural one. “When anyone in the humanities is deciding what to teach,” Burt says, “we ask ourselves: what do we like? What is worth studying? What is important to make available and isn’t already being covered in courses that others are teaching?” For Burt, science fiction literature fits the bill. “A number of Harvard students seem to agree,” he notes...
Part of what makes a science fiction class such a draw for Harvard students is attributable to Burt himself, whose lecture antics are the stuff of legend amongst his pupils. “He’s a fantastic lecturer—he throws candy at us, he jumps out windows, he gets his point across,” says Betsy C. Isaacson ’10. This year, Burt’s dynamic style attracted such a large number of students that additional Teaching Fellows had to be hired and a bigger lecture venue procured...