Slipstreaming, 2027 Publikoa

This course explores the strange, unstable terrain of slipstream fiction—often called the “New Weird”—a literary mode that dissolves the boundaries between realism, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Emerging in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, slipstream resists classification, favoring tonal dissonance, ontological uncertainty, and narrative estrangement. Its texts confront readers with worlds that feel at once familiar and profoundly alien, where the ordinary is unsettled by the uncanny and the impossible intrudes without explanation.

Through a curated selection of contemporary novels and short fiction, The Student will examine how slipstream authors disrupt conventional genre expectations while engaging urgent cultural, philosophical, and ecological questions. Works may include narratives of fractured identity, bureaucratic absurdity, ecological transformation, and surreal urban spaces—texts in which reality itself appears porous, unstable, or contested.

Particular attention will be given to the aesthetics of disorientation: how these works manipulate voice, structure, and genre to produce a lingering sense of unease or wonder. We will situate slipstream within broader literary traditions, including postmodernism, magical realism, speculative fiction, and the gothic, while also considering its relationship to late capitalism, climate crisis, and technological mediation.

The Student will develop critical frameworks for reading hybrid and genre-defying texts, produce analytical essays, and experiment with their own slipstream writing. By the end of the course, participants will be equipped to articulate what makes slipstream distinctive—and why its refusal of boundaries offers a compelling lens for understanding contemporary literature and experience.

The course runs June through September, 2027 and is bookended by 2 anthologies: Feeling Very Strange, and later, The Weird.