Eng 227: The Early Modern Cyborg
Spring 2005, Hollins University
MWF 9.10-10.10
Office: Turner C, 144 (Bradley 105 first week only!!!!!)
Office phone:540. 362. 6433
Hours: TBA
Texts for the Course:
Critical excerpts and definitions
The Metaphysical Poets ed. Helen Gardner (Penguin/Viking) [bookstore]
Shakespeare, William Coriolanus ed. Crewe (Penguin) [bookstore]
Edgerton, Samuel “Linear Perspective” and Ivins, “On the Rationality of Sight” [reserve]
Excerpts, Descartes and John Wilkins [reserve]
Cavendish, Margaret The Blazing World [bookstore]
Hoffmann, ETA “The Sandman” and Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” [reserve]
Excerpts, La Mettrie’s Man a Machine [reserve]
Shelley, Mary Frankenstein [bookstore]
Jackson, Shelley Patchwork Girl [online]http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/PatchworkGirl.html
“The Visible Human Project” [online]http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/vhpconf98/MAIN.HTM
Films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
Francois Truffaut, The Wild Child
The term cyborg was coined in 1960 to describe cybernetic organisms – entities and events that bring together technology and human beings. In more contemporary contexts it has become a conceptual frame for questions about the limits of humanness in relation to technology, nature, and the progressive state of information culture. Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, is just one of many texts exemplifying how the figure of the cyborg emerges earlier than is often thought, and is transhistorical in its appeals to the anxiety surrounding creativity, hybrid embodiment, and empowerment.
Questions we will pursue:
What do hybrids of human/machine reveal to us about our struggles with the ethical and creative potential in ‘being and becoming human’?
How do our fears about machines controlling/taking the place of/or enhancing humanness intersect with other pressing cultural concerns (gender, culture, creativity and its limits)?
In what ways did early modern cyborgs and the literature written about them contribute to developing notions of humanist enlightenment; and the divisions between humans and other species? {see first-day handout on Descartes and Shakespeare}
Does the figure of the cyborg facilitate an alternative model of creativity, one that moves beyond the idea of individual “genius,” reproduction, and subjects and objects? ; Does looking at earlier figures of the cyborg help us to envision some other ways of thinking about how concepts and systems develop and evolve as collective entities?
Requirements:
Weekly responses = 30%
Final essay= 25%
Presentation = 15%
Attendance and participation = 15%
Leading a discussion = 15%
Schedule: Early Modern Cyborg
Defining the Cyborg:
George Landow's Cyborg sitehttp://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/cyborgov.html
"Interrupted Idylls": Early 'technologies', pastoralism, and re-inventing nature
Week one: Definitions and Haraway; broadening the def. of cyborg consciousness; The Matrix; reading early poetry: Shakespeare, "The Phoenix and the Turtle"; poetry as media in the 17th c.
Week of 2.7: (Metaphysics: 'strong lines' and bodily conceits) --John Donne, "The Canonization"; "Aire and Angels"; "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies day, Being the shortest day"; "Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward"; Andrew Marvell, "The Definition of Love"
Week of 2.14: ('conceding likeness in unlikeness'; making automatons: spirit and sense, the machine in the garden) -- Donne, "Love's Alchemie"; George Herbert, "Man"; Andrew Marvell, "On a Drop of Dew"; "A Dialogue between the Soul and Body"; "The Mower Against Gardens"; "The Mower to the Glo-Worms"; "The Garden"; Excerpts, "Upon Appleton House"; Thomas Traherne, "Shadows in the Water"
Contemporary Inflections:
UVa: "Fortune": "Harmonizing the Machine in the Garden"
Levittown: Documents of an Ideal American Suburb
The body politic: not quite human, neither a machine
4: Week of 2.21: "Interrupted Idylls" revisited: hypertext poetry; Background on Shakespeare; Introduction to Coriolanus; Screening of Metropolis.
5: Week of 2.28: William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
6: Week of 3.7 : Coriolanus; Samuel Edgerton, "Linear Perspective"; William Ivins, "On the Rationality of Sight"; the early modern body and the anatomical theatre
7: Week of 3.14: Rene Descartes, 'automatons'; La Metrie's "Man a Machine."
3.21: spring break!!!
Gender and EM cyborgs
8: 3.28: new genres, new questions: early science fiction; Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
9: 4.4: The Blazing World; Hoffmann's "The Sandman" and Freud's "The Uncanny"
Modern bodies, technology, and re-inventing nature II
10: 4.11 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: screening of Wild Child
11: 4.18: Frankenstein
12: 4.25: Frankenstein; Secondary TBA
13: 5.3-5.7: Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl; The Visible Human Project; Reading Frankenstein other new media projects TBA
