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Course Syllabus (Sp19) Coli 214b--Literature & Society: "A.I. And Other Radical Humanisms In Cyberpunk And Science Fiction", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

As that which we call “technology” continues to evolve as both concept and practice, we discover ever more inventive ways to answer its call, and science fiction seems to serve as a universal standpoint from which global societies manage to confront, question, and reimagine the nature of our shared humanity as a radically technical relation. While the growing social pervasiveness of artificial intelligence and the attendant encoded transformations of “the human” appear, together, to form a relatively absolute horizon of political thinking, social agency, and aesthetic experience, it seems certain that our current crisis also offers us …

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

Course Syllabus (Fa15) Coli 211 Literature & Psychology: "Material Aesthetics", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty Scholarship

An examination of questions concerning aesthetic experience from the standpoint of the structural and functional logics of the capitalist mode of production