Adam Syversten

Tell us a little bit about your Honors 101 World Literature class, A Brief Literary History of the Future!

The course was called A Brief Literary History of the Future, and I really wanted to encourage students to think about the types of stories we tell ourselves about the future. My research area is in utopian and speculative fiction, and I think there’s a great deal of media where we’re inundated with images that say “Capture your future” or “Do your future” or something similar. I really want students to think about the history of the future as a concept. People don’t always think the future will be the same thing, and they don’t always plan for it in the way that we do. By engaging with the history of science fiction and speculative fiction texts, I was hoping to encourage students to think critically about these questions: What presuppositions do certain ideas about the future entail? Who does it serve if we think about the future in certain ways? And where is the power located?

What has the experience been like returning to DePaul University to teach now?

I have to admit, it’s been very surreal. While it’s been a joy, a sense of strangeness has probably been the predominant feeling. I actually taught in the same room where I took an honors class, so being at the front of that classroom was certainly a different experience. When I first came to DePaul, the intention was never to become an English professor. I don’t even think I knew that was a possibility or how one would go about it. So to be here now is incredibly surreal.

Looking back at your time in the Honors Program, what valuable lessons and skills have stuck with you throughout graduate school and your career?

First and foremost, research skills. I came to college with no idea what professors actually did. I thought they were just “big kid” teachers, where you go to school for a few extra years, and instead of teaching high school, you teach college. But professors do research, so how do you go about that? How do you research the history of a text? How do you engage with archives? How do you use search engines to narrow down a research field? I think the main skills I developed as an Honors student were research skills. It sounds basic, but they’re so critical for organizing information and trying to make sense of it. I’m really thankful for all the opportunities I had in the Honors Program to do work I was interested in within an academic setting.

Is there any book or author that has shaped your approach to teaching (world literature)?

There are too many to count. I’ve been fortunate to have so many great professors and models for teaching, both at DePaul and in graduate school. One of the key texts for my research is Archaeologies of the Future by Fredric Jameson. It is one of the single most important texts shaping the way I approach this idea of the future, thinking about it as a concept with a history. It is something that has not always existed in the form we imagine today, but has changed over time. It also emphasizes that our notion of the future is deeply narrative. It is about stories, the kind of stories we tell ourselves about what things will be like. I have really taken that approach to thinking about the future from that book.

What is one thing you hope every student in your class learns?

One thing I want students to take from my class is the idea that a better world is possible. In all the thinking we do about the future, I hope students leave with a real sense of contingency. The future is not something set in stone. It has not been decided. It is the accumulation of many individual human actions, and we are human beings capable of changing our circumstances and approaching things differently. Part of the reason I love teaching this course is that I hope it creates fractures, or space, in a student’s mind where they can see that different ways of life are possible. The current system we are living and surviving under is not the only way humans can live. We can do things differently. But it is our task as human beings to make it that way.