Engendering Critical Literacy through Science Fiction and Fantasy

Abstract

While teaching a nine-week mini-course in science fiction and fantasy literature, I made an important discovery: this sub-genre can be used to stimulate philosophical inquiry, that is, the ability to think critically and creatively and to make connections among disciplines. My students were involved in group discussions about sets of novels arranged around various themes. In one group, two members were inviting their peers to explore metaphysical questions raised by Ursula K. Le Guin's Lathe of Heaven (1976) and Isaac Asimov's End of Eternity (1986). (The first novel focuses on a character whose dreams change reality; the second on a member of an elite order whose time-travel technology allows them to reshape the past, present, and future to their desires and purposes.) These two students, who were also taking a logic course in the math department at the time, suggested that it is impossible to distinguish between dream and reality. Provoked, another student argued that persons who are awake can feel pain while persons who are dreaming do not. Yes, but can't you think you're feeling pain in a dream? the philosophic pair retorted, dismissing this rather simplistic argument. Can't you tell the difference between being awake and asleep by violation of natural laws? I mean, if someone dreams that she is floating through the air with no support, doesn't that give us a way of seeing a difference? offered another in the group. second group was comparing and contrasting views of life after a nuclear holocaust: Alas, Babylon, Pat Frank (1976); A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller, Jr. (1976); Shikasta, Doris Lessing (1979). Their questions were interdisciplinary, moving between scientific and social issues. The thing that bothers me is that all these books think a nuclear war is survivable. I'm not sure. Could anyone really survive a nuclear winter? wondered one student aloud. A second suggested that we all should encourage politicians to freeze the production of nuclear weapons; still a third went back to Miller's novel to ask again this question: even if we survived, wouldn't we just do it again? Students in a third group were discussing the role of the hero in T. H. White's Once and Future