124221 SE Cultural and Media Studies Seminar (2024W)

This seminar offers an introduction to the concept of adaptation studies, asking students to critically investigate how ideas, themes and motives are translated from one medium into an other.

Philip K. Dick has shaped how Hollywood pictures dystopian futures for the better part of 4 decades. Dick wrote more than 40 novels and numerous short stories, most of which were published between the early 1950s and the late 1970s. Many of his fictions are set on earth in the near future and usually explore bleak outlooks on the future of human society in the aftermath of warfare as well as natural disasters in which surveillance technologies as well as the hyper commercialization of everyday life and turbo capitalism shape the lives of his protagonists.

Among the most well-known adaptations are Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi/neo-noir thriller Blade Runner which is vaguely based on Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?. Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 sci-fi thriller Total Recall as well as its 2012 remake by Len Wiseman are based on Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”. Other short stories such as “Minority Report” and “Paycheck” have likewise been adapted to film in the early 2000s as well as Dick’s novel "A Scanner Darkly" which was adapted to film in 2006 by Richard Linklater.

Students will be also asked to analyze how specific topics that Dick brings up in his texts, such as eugenics, the horrors of nuclear warfare, the human perception of reality, instances of state-controlled mass surveillance of individuals are being either dutifully translated into, pushed aside or aggressively reconfigured when his work is being adapted from the page to the screen.

Key Questions/Ideas to be addressed in this seminar:
What is the purpose of dystopian fictions?
In how for is the genre of Science Fiction a form of cultural history?
How does one do adaptations?
How does adaptation connect to intertextuality?