Bread Loaf Lecture Series: “Friend to Friend in the Endtime: Imagining Solidarity, Writing the Future” with Jess Row

Dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels like Parable of the Sower, Station Eleven, Severance, Fiskadoro, and Dhalgren often imagine relationships of love, companionship, and interdependence across lines of race, gender identification, class, age, and nationality. This lecture raises the question of why these stories seem so attractive in the future, yet impossible in the present, and what we can learn from dystopian narratives about creating better characters in any story.