Dystopia and Hope: Leif Enger's "I Cheerfully Refuse" in a Speculative Fiction Context

Presented by Dr. Rachel Anderson, Professor at GVSU


Registration preferred (FREE) – click below to register.
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From Sir Thomas More’s publication of his Utopia (1516), literature around a “perfect” society has become a recognized genre.

Its cousin, dystopia, has become even more popular, especially in recent years. Novels like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and Susan Collins’ The Hunger Games books show not a perfect society, but a scarily awful one.

These “mirror-image utopias” are often near-future projections that often show how bad choices make worse futures.

In this talk, we’ll discuss the history of utopian/dystopian lit, and look at how Leif Engler’s novel I Cheerfully Refuse fits into and challenges the genre.

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Bio: Rachel Anderson is a Professor of English at Grand Valley State University. She teaches courses in British literature (especially Shakespeare), contemporary drama, and science fiction. She also teaches courses in GVSU’s Digital Studies program on social media and digital ethics. Her most recent publication is “‘I Don’t Want to Be Human’: The Neurodivergent Reader Response to Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries Series” and she’s very much enjoying the AppleTV+ adaptation of Murderbot!

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