The new Prelim List, or, How Amy Dies by Grad School

After going through my notes from my two meetings with Sandy Goodhart, I have successfully composed the following sort-of final prelim outline.

Topic areas, the major things the prelim will cover:

The rhetorical tradition of discourse on social change, including: dystopia as topoi, places from which to speak, a recurring position for a recurring concern. Aristotle's Rhetoric,
Plato's Republic and the tradition of rhetoric and utopia/dystopia. Burke's
dystopian/utopian musings, his assumptions about agency and symoblic action
leading to (or away from?) utopia

The literary tradition of apocalyptic or prophetic fiction: Judeo-Christian apocalyptic fiction and its rhetorical structures. Dystopia as tragedy for the postmodern era (including a critique of humanism and human agency)

Current transformations of that tradition and its relationship to PoMo's critique of causality, order, and master narratives: Dystopian film's adaptations of more the written fictions as problematic, particularly in conjunction with agency (The Matrix,
Blade Runner, Terminator series)


Yeah, no prob. Cough.

Reading List
Aristotle's On Rhetoric
Plato's The Republic
More's Utopia
Bacon's New Atlantis
Derrida's "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"
Various essays by Eric Rabkin
Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
Buber: Paths in Utopia; and Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour
Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism
Lyotard's The PostModern Condition
Jameison's Archaeologies of the Future
Burke: "On HellHaven", Permanence and Change, Phil of Lit Form, the Motives
trilogy
Blanchot's "Literature and the right to death"
Dostoyevski's Notes from Underground
Rousseau's Walden Two
Theatre of the Abusrd: Works from Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Camus
M Keith Booker's Field Guide to Dystopian Fiction and The Dystopian Impulse in
Modern Literature
The popular dystopias of the 30s and 40s: Brave New World, We, 1984, Fahrenheit
451
The next generation of dystopian fiction (50s-70s): Lord of the Flies,
Clockwork Orange, Player Piano, He,She,It, The Dispossessed
The "postmodern" dystopias: Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep (and many other Dick novels), Gibson's first trilogy
(Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), Feed, maybe Discworld
The Films: Filmic versions of the traditional dystopias, Terminator series (and
tv show), Blade Runner, some of the really bad ones like "The Island", Minority
Report, I am Legend, Enemy of the State (oh, let's just list all the Will Smith
films, shall we?)....and any others?


Yep. I'm a dead woman.