123426 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2020S)

"Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Human Enhancement in North American Literatures"
One of the global topical issues today is the possible realization of utopian dreams of improving the human potential by applying advanced technologies and medical drugs in order to increase mental and physical capacities and cure illnesses and (latent) weaknesses. Large-scale experiments aiming at enhancing human power and performance have given rise to (heated) debates about the complex problems involved in the individual and collective voluntary application of such methods, and have inspired writers to explore the risks of their abuse in dystopian texts. The long tradition of pessimistic views of the progress and application of biomedical technologies and of various ways of shaping individuals and society at large, potentially through dictatorial regimes, has thus gained a new topicality.
Related to this topic has been the debate on the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the alleged superiority of robots and similar efficient tools over human talent, with visions of the enhancement of the human mind by a deliberate hybridization, which may put the authentically human in jeopardy and radically divide humanity into groups with enhanced and with all-too limited skills.
These alarming possibilities depicted by contemporary authors with a keen interest in the evolution of the natural sciences and medicine is to be considered in this seminar. Among the North American texts with dystopian features to be studied in class will be Walker Percy’s novel Love in the Ruins (1971), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Dave Eggers The Circle (2013).
The seminar will offer opportunities to discuss these contemporary texts in the light of the debate presented at the international conference convened in Vienna in March.