123225 SE Literature Seminar / BA Paper / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2014W)

David Lyon has famously argued that surveillance has become “the dominant organizing practice of late modernity;” it is the structural principle on which western societies rely for their functionality and sustenance. Especially with recent debates about state control and secret services, surveillance has emerged as both the central modus operandi of contemporary governance and as a site of ideological struggle, in which privacy is pitted against security, and epistemological uncertainty is equated with public risk and menace. As popular TV serials such as The Wire, Homeland, or The Americans demonstrate—in audiovisual equivalents of the short story format—the nexus between visual perception and political power has become a dominant topos of the twenty-first century.
This seminar will look at the development of surveillance as it has been represented in North American novels over the past 60 years; from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Dave Eggers’s recent The Circle. We will explore current theories of surveillance from a variety of different disciplines, placing particular focus on the connections between the visual and power, between technologies of observation and governance, as well as between dystopian imaginaries and fictional scenarios of resistance.