Abstract:
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy is part of a vast corpus of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction that has defined pop cultural production for the first two decades of the 21st century. What is more, this trilogy in particular sparked a significant output of speculative fiction aimed primarily at young adult audiences, portraying the future of humankind as dire and featuring heroes who face a multitude of repressions, conflicts, and tribulations. In tandem with the continued polarization of the political landscape of the United States, a host of political motivations and affiliations have been read into these fictions. The Hunger Games in particular has been read as a liberal, even leftist, dystopia that criticizes capitalist exploitation, while conservative groups, such as the Tea Party Patriots, have also embraced the trilogy as representing the potential evils of government overreach.
Aside from the trench warfare of polarized real-life US politics—including the “correct” way to understand this trilogy’s political message—young adult dystopias dramatize issues such as marginalization, social and economic inequality, moral and ethical dilemmas, and, of course, the ways in which the heroes of these narratives, with whom their audiences are encouraged to identify with, endure and overcome systemic and personal oppression and attempt to build better worlds. Asking not only “what if…” but also “what then…,” speculative fiction emerges as a medium that can offer a site for young adults a way to examine real-life problems they face in the real world, as these narratives offer them a point of connection through experiencing similar challenges. This lecture, therefore, examines the ways in which The Hunger Games trilogy can be used as a vehicle for critical and ethical literacy for young adult readers in- and outside of the classroom.
Bio:
Dr. Maxi Albrecht is currently a researcher and lecturer at the University of Siegen, where she previously completed a DFG-funded research project on the serial circulation of German-American city mysteries from the 1850s. Before joining Siegen, she substituted for a junior professorship in the Department of Culture at Freie Universität Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute (JFKI), where she also completed her PhD on Speculative Survival, Intelligence Politics, and Neoliberalism. Her time in academia actually started at MLU Halle-Wittenberg, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Intercultural European and American Studies and History. She fondly remembers a block seminar here at the Leucorea, where she found the topic for her Bachelor’s thesis.