123223 SE Literary Seminar / BA-Arbeit / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2020W)

One of the major current topics of discussion is the possible realization of the perennial utopian dream of improving the human potential by applying medical drugs or technological means in order to increase the mental and physical capacities and cure illnesses or /and eliminate social evil. A related issue is the development of artificial intelligence which is increasingly applied and the rapid progress in this sphere, which has given rise to fears of risks resulting from the alleged superiority of robots and the possibility of putting the authentically human in jeopardy through the evolution of hybrids.
These potentially alarming possibilities depicted by modern authors will be considered in this seminar, which continues a debate begun in the preceding semester.
Among the literary texts written by American authors or Anglophone writers during their residence in North America will be Walker Percy’s dystopian novel The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? (1968), and Aldous Huxley’s late novel Island (1962). The long tradition of this contemporary concern with human enhancement will be indicated by an early story by Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”), while the fictional use of early robots will be illustrated by one of Isaac Asimov’s short stories (“Satisfaction Guaranteed”).