123426 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2019W)

In our 21st century present, the boundary between science fictional fantasy and reality seems to be increasingly blurred. On an everyday level, we are surrounded by an 'internet of things' and intelligent virtual assistants, 'augmented reality' and remote steering technology, which enables minimally invasive surgery and drone warfare alike. We witness progress in stem cell technology, DNA-editing and -replication, and discuss whether smart cars may make decisions that kill people. Prosthetic limbs, medical implants, and pharmaceutical augmentation revolutionize how we think of the limits and possibilities of the human body, while climatological studies of the Anthropocene model disconcerting trajectories on the future of planetary ecosphere and the consequences of human speciesism.
Fiction provides a space for imagining such futures, both utopian and dystopian, and invites its audiences to negotiate individual and collective hopes and fears. The aim of this course is to investigate the ‘human question’ by studying a number of philosophical and literary texts as well as films and TV-productions that engage in defining and problematizing humanness. What constitutes life and what makes us human? What separates us from non-human others, and what ethical implications follow for contemporary humanism, once the boundaries of human exceptionalism are drawn into question? And what function may fictional narrative across media and genre conventions have, in coming to terms with such issues?
The class will read and discusses samples of public discourse, fiction, and theoretical texts with an emphasis on biology, pharmacology, and the life sciences in general. The class contextualizes North American cultural production comparatively, and we will consider Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Michel Houllebecq’s Possibilité d’une ile or Serotonine, parts of Margaret Atwood’s MadAddam-Trilogy, and Richard Powers Generosity, as well as a selection of contemporary film and TV-Series (please think in advance about what you’d like to screen and discuss and prepare to make your case for an in-class vote on primary materials).
Throughout the semester, students will practice to work on joint projects for presentations and finish with a final scholarly paper. Class participation requires a willingness to read and screen extensively and to engage with difficult and (as is often the case with artistic imagination) potentially explicit or provocative subject matter.