Jen Caruso Sabbatical Presentation: Refusing the Future: Survival Narratives in 21st-Century Dystopian Literature and Film

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Post-2008, contemporary filmmakers recognized the dystopias from the mid-to-late twentieth century, as prescient works. Through remediation into film, they adapt or update the genre of critical dystopia, a genre that often employs the trope of the found diary, journal, or document. This presentation will focus on Patricia Rozema's 2015 adaptation of Jean Hegland's novel, published in 1996, Into the Forest.

Dr. Jen Caruso earned a PhD in Comparative Literature with an emphasis on European modernism and critical theory from the State University of New York at Buffalo and holds an MA from the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Her recent research and teaching interests include socially-engaged art practice, aesthetics in the context of late capitalism, and cultural responses to climate change. She has an essay on alienated labor in the novels of William Gibson in the anthology, Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism (Bloomsbury).