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WiSe 15/16: HS-Constructing Difference: Literary and Cultural Histories: Transhuman Modernities

Jennifer Wawrzinek

Kommentar

The onset of Modernity is generally associated with a system of thought that attaches primary importance to human values such as rationality and the self-consious, self-willed individual. In the eighteenth century and beyond these values were used to sustain a belief in ethical and political progress as an affirmation of a common humanity and the belief in the fundamental equality of all human beings regardless of nation, language, religion, ethnic origin and so forth. Yet this same period is also marked by contestations of such thought, from Foucault's anti-humanism to Derridean deconstruction and more recent ecocritical critiques of anthropocentrism. More recently the twin discourses of transhumanism and posthumanism have sought to find a language that can begin to move beyond the limitations of humanist philosophy by insisting upon emergent ontologies, fluid or fractured identities and systems of epistemology that remain distinctly open to both human and nonhuman entities. Over the course of the semester students will examine a range of texts, from fiction to poetry and film, that in various ways interrogate, critique and/or problematise the idea of the human. Beginning with current discourses of the transhuman, as a transitional stage towards the posthuman, as well as discourses of the posthuman, students will read a selection of texts from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first centuries in order to critically examine the ways in which writers and filmmakers from the Enlightenment period to today have questioned the positioning of the 'rational' human as superior to other species.
NB: This course is offered in conjunction with MA-T 17399 "Reading Affect". Students must enrol in both components of the module in order to participate in either course.
Set Texts: John Berger, King Raimond Gaita, The Philosopher's Dog Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Kriv Stenders, dir. Red Dog (dvd) Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
NB: Course readings will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester Schließen