As a course in the final semester, Genre: Speculative Fiction demonstrates the ways in which literature engages with our present and potential futures. You will learn how to identify and apply principles and characteristics of genre studies through the exploration of Speculative Fiction, chosen for its relevance to contemporary fields like Environmental Humanities and Cultural Studies of Science. The course will progress through analytical frameworks for the study of genres and move on to an application of these in samples of speculative fiction from India and the rest of the world. Potential authors featured in the course include Ursula Le Guin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Vandana Singh and Amitav Ghosh. You, along with other students, will also develop your own stories using narratives encountered in the course and contemporary issues in our time, to demonstrate the work done by speculative texts.