ENGL 30019 - Literature and the Media

Course Credit: 1
Maximum Credit: 0

Literature and the Media Technology and literature have historically been mobilized to circumscribe knowledge about marginalized communities. Eighteenth-century writers claimed indigenous people saw colonial technology as magic; today, we debate whether social media enhances or limits democracy in the Global South. This research seminar explores the influence of literary production and technological mediation on collective power. We will investigate orally-transmitted narratives such as the Malian epic Sundiata and Irish ballads; nineteenth century works exploring technology’s rising influence, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds; and contemporary texts about our relationship to social media, such as Teju Cole’s Hafiz and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. Writings by postcolonial, race, gender, ecocritical, and media theorists such as Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, and Rob Nixon provide an analytic framework to reflect on the relationship between the human and the digital-and on our own lives as creative, digital subjects. Prerequisites: Take ENGL-20000 and 2 Literature Courses - Must be completed prior to taking this course. Prerequisite(s): Take ENGL-20000 and 2 Literature courses [AH]