LITR 4632: Literature of
the Future
Web-Highlight 2009
Christi Wood
30 June 2009
LITR 4632: Literature of
the Future
Sample Student final
exams 2007
Laura Moran
1 July 2007
Part I
Virtually or Actually: Keeping it Real
Even though the literature in this class is futuristic, the characters keeping the stories on an even keel are the ones who seem most familiar to the reader. While they may set out to do the extraordinary, it is usually ordinary characteristics that make them special. As I mentioned in my midterm, in Parable we watch Lauren first disguise herself as a man in order to keep only herself alive, then her transformation into a sharing woman who learns that not only can she survive easier with the help of others if she learns to trust them. Although she had been prepared for some time, sure that an apocalyptic event would force her into some sort of action, she had not counted on her family being killed. I also feel that human emotion and the need to connect with nature will keep us from going completely into a virtual existence. Sara Brito touches on this aspect in her 2005 final essay:
In “The Onion and I” the reader sees change and diversity though the father and son trying to perfect the onion in the matrix world. The dad, though he cannot express it because of his lack of right words, needs the onion to have a contingent variable to be considered perfect. He even keeps the odd onions he had grown that resembled people created through natural evolution or mutation. The father, as a farmer, knows that in nature contingency happens and it can be beautiful. While the matrix becomes the farmer’s wife’s utopia, the farmer sees the matrix as a dystopia because it is unnatural. In essence, each of us has a goal, something we want. If it can be achieved, the world is friendly and utopian; however if it cannot be achieved our world becomes a dystopia.
While I agree with Brito’s summation of “Onion”, I do not see eye to eye with her last sentence. I think that humans tend to keep trying until they are at least happy with their world; that no one settles for dystopia in life and even though I do predict that there will be people who prefer virtual reality to reality, I think there will always be those would keep at least one foot in the real world.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/4632/models/finals/finals07/final07moran1.htm
LITR 4632: Literature of
the Future
Sample Student Final
Essay 2003
Sara Sills
LITR 4632
June 30, 2003
Dr. White
Final Exam
Throughout the semester, we have been reading scenarios of the future, different depictions of the future seen through many different authors’ eyes. The future intrigues everybody because of the mystery it holds. No matter how hard we try, we do not know what the future holds in store for us, and that causes interest on both the parts of the author and the reader. We like to think we know what will happen by looking at how the world is today, and how we live our lives. Our examination of the world now helps us try to determine how the world will be in years to come. This makes the present very important. But this present will one day be the past. That does not mean we will discard these years as if unimportant. The past helps to mold our future. It helps us figure what the future may be like, and it helps us to seek that knowledge of what the future will be like. We learn from experience, and to neglect former knowledge and understanding brings potential for a dystopic future. Whether the stories reveal a high-tech society or a low-tech, the past is constantly being brought to a factor to make the new world more of a utopian one.
The Onion and I is one of the more obvious examples of the importance of the past and not forgetting our roots. The father in the story is dealing with two worlds- one of cyberspace and one of reality. The problem is, though, that the future he lives in is trying to make cyberspace his own reality. The computer world could not even create an onion to match an organic one, so the father cannot see how anything else in cyberspace could be considered quality, or real. He remembers the taste, smell, and feel of onions, and has nostalgia for the past and how it once was before computers took over. He makes his son realize, too, that computers are imperfect, and the past may not have been so bad, after all. Some things seem to get lost in the shuffle when living in such a high-tech society, but morality and knowledge of things previously learned are important aspects to incorporate into our future.
The same idea-holding on to what was once precious, so as to gain knowledge of the future- is present in Drapes and Folds. In this story, we read of all of the mistakes made by government, in an attempt to control humans. The author realizes that because we are human and imperfect, we are going to have to make mistakes. That fact will not change in the future. How we adapt and mold to these decisions helps to alter our future, though, in a different way. In the government’s attempt to forget all things once held valuable by us, they fail. Their press for a perfect society will never happen, especially if they do not learn from mistakes made in the past. They seem to ignore past transgressions, though, in an effort to create a “new and better” future. In the end, though, morality and family ties prove to be the only constant, something we have always valued in our culture. So no matter how hard we try to escape the past, we never will and we never should. It is a part of our future.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/4632/models/finals/finals03/sills.htm