WiSe 19/20: S-Culture-Gender-Media: Humans and Machines in Victorian Literature and Culture
Sabine Schülting
Comments
“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it […] the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery”, Thomas Carlyle wrote in Sign of the Times (1829). The rapid changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, but also by other scientific and technological developments, were met with both fascination and anxiety. The ‘Age of Machinery’ posed questions not only as to the nature and quality of human labour, but also to (wo)man–machine relationships and the fundamental question of what it meant to be human. We will discuss nineteenth-century literary and non-literary explorations of these questions in a variety of genres (essay, poetry, industrial novel, utopian/dystopian fiction etc.) and discuss how writing was impacted by concepts of mechanism and vitalism. These aspects seem particularly interesting at the beginning of the 21st century when Artificial Intelligence poses comparable questions. We will explore the continuities but also the differences between the past and the present and probe the usefulness of more recent critical approaches (such as Posthumanism) to theorize 19th-century discourses.
Texts: Students should read Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854); William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890); and H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), preferably in the (inexpensive) Penguin editions. Shorter texts will be made available on Blackboard.
Assessment will be on the basis of regular and active attendance; participation in all classroom activities (e.g. presentations, group work, response papers); and an essay of c. 4000 words.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments