Based on the best-selling novel by Margaret Atwood, this series is set in Gilead, a totalitarian society in what used to be part of the United States. Gilead is ruled by a fundamentalist regime that treats women as property of the state, and is faced with environmental disasters and a plummeting birth rate. In a desperate attempt to repopulate a devastated world, the few remaining fertile women are forced into sexual servitude. One of these women, Offred, is determined to survive the terrifying world she lives in, and find the daughter that was taken from her.

The Handmaid's Tale (TV Show)

In the struggle for an ever more equitable and just society, we must lean on literature for the experience of worlds imagined. These may serve as beacons, whether welcoming or warning, to light the path we as a community want to take. In utopias we find the ideal, the prototype, the horizon on which our values and dreams converge. In dystopias, the opposite, the nightmare we wish to wake from. In this sense, science fiction in general and dystopian fiction in particular can help us better understand our world and how to improve it by showing us the inherent dangers within it.
In her award-winning novel, The Handmaid&rsquo;s Tale, Margaret Atwood offers us the vision of a future gone completely astray. In the Republic of Gilead society is puritanical, oppressive, unfair, unjust, unforgiving. But not unrealistic. In imagining this possible future for us, Atwood shows us precisely what is wrong with our present and the logical extension of it should we continue to indulge the patriarchy. As a work of dystopian fiction this proves that to imagine better worlds we must move away from the one we have inherited, and to create worse ones is as easy as keeping it the same.
This course will consist of a collective close reading of Atwood&rsquo;s novel, as well as a look into complimentary intertextual material that will hopefully inspire a critical contemplation of our society and propose new and challenging calls to actions. We will consider not just new ways of experiencing femininity and masculinity, but also the entire panoply of gender. Literature can help us think and feel in deeper and more extensive ways, and thus make us more sensitive to the pressures we face as a community. This course is aimed at building upon that foundation to inspire change, because the endless pursuit of utopia demands the participation of all.

The Handmaid's Tale (TV Show)

Bruce Miller

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