IDS 3932
Technology and Culture
Michael
Harrawood
(561)
799-8617
mharrawo@fau.edu
Michael Harrawood's homepage
Office HC
174, Hours: TBA
Daniel White
(561) 799-8651
Office HC 146, Hours: T
& R 2:45-3:45
Summer A 2010
Revised 6/1/10
(Please review this online syllabus regularly for updates.)
Course Description: In the late twentieth century, we tend to equate technology with sophisticated engineering and complicated gadgetry. Technology allows heart monitors, high-tech weapons, and Facebook to run. The wheel, such a staple of modern life, hardly seems complex enough to be called a technological wonder, but it changed the course of human development. Likewise the change from oral to written communication transformed ancient Greece. The mariner’s astrolabe made better navigation possible to guide the Age of Exploration, and the printing press generated the first “modern” “information revolution.” During the semester, we will examine various kinds of technology, from industrial megatechnics to communications media, and consider their interactions with “culture” (see the Oxford English Dictionary for definitions of these key terms). We will pay particular attention to the relationships among science, technology, philosophy, and literature. Other subjects to be explored will include biotechnology, film, visual art, music, cybernetics, cyberculture, virtual reality, and education for individuals inhabiting the realm prophetically described by Prospero’s daughter Miranda: “O brave new world/ That has such people in’t!” (Tempest V.I.185-186).
Required Texts:
Susan Bruce,
Ed. Three Early Modern Utopias
Philip K. Dick, The
Simulacra (S.F.Masterworks)
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Martin Heidegger,
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays
William
Shakespeare, The Tempest (The Oxford Shakespeare: Oxfords World's Classics)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford
World's Classics)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick
or Lonesome No More!: A Novel
Other
required readings appear on the syllabus (online or BB).
Films:
Student
Recommendations:
Course Policies: Attendance, promptness and class participation are mandatory. Unexcused absences will result in a lower grade. During this summer session, each period equals one week of class. Accordingly we will file an F for any student with three (3) unexcused absences. It is essential that everyone be on time for class and remain for the scheduled period. In addition, please enter the classroom respectfully by being well prepared for and an active participant in discussion; by turning off cell phones; by using laptops only for class notes and web-enhancement of discussion, and avoiding any activity that distracts from our dialogue.
Overall, we expect you to
comport yourselves throughout the course as upper-division Honors
Students. This means, among other
things, that you must treat your peers and the course material with respect
just as we treat you with respect. You are expected to come to class well
versed in the material and ready for an engaged and lucid discussion.
Please print out everything we’ve uploaded for you on BB, read and mark it, and bring it to class for discussion. Your papers must have your name, the course number, and the date in the upper left corner. You must number the pages of everything you hand us.
Grades will be determined as follows:
Three response papers (500 words each) 40% Must be submitted on time in typed hard copy (you may revise one of the three essays to receive a fourth grade if you wish).
One final essay (1500 words) 25% The final essay must be submitted in duplicate so that it can be graded by both professors.
Oral
presentation* 25% Based
on approved prospectus and presented extemporaneously based on an outline,
bibliography, and PowerPoint (if needed).
Participation
& attendance 10% Requires
daily preparation, focused attention, active speaking and listening, with no
extraneous multitasking.
Presentations: are to be conducted by groups of 3 or 4; should be 30 minutes in length with an additional 10 or 15 minutes of discussion; and should include an interdisciplinary discussion of the class’s key themes in terms of literature, philosophy, and visual media. Each group must turn in a one-page prospectus and confer with the instructors before making its presentation.
Plagiarism: You must acknowledge the source of any idea in your paper that is not your own in a footnote at the end of the paper. Any words directly quoted from a book must be put in quotation marks and footnoted. Failure to follow this procedure constitutes plagiarism, a very serious academic offense which will result in failing this course.
Honor Code:
Students enrolled in this course agree to abide by the Honors College
Honor Code: http://www.fau.edu/divdept/honcol/academics_honor_code.htm.
Please note: If you have a physical, psychiatric/emotional, medical or learning disability that may affect your ability to carry out the work of the course or that will require extra time on examinations, please notify us in the first two weeks of the semester so that we can make appropriate arrangements. We would also urge you to contact the staff in the Disabled Student Services office (DSS), Humanities 133 (632-6748). DSS will review your concerns and determine with you what accommodations are necessary and appropriate. All information and documentation of disability is confidential.
Week I
5/18 Begin Bacon, The New Atlantis in Three Modern Utopias; Novum Organum (Aphorisms 1-68); read aphorisms 1-46. Film: Forbidden Planet.
Recommended
readings: Francis
Bacon Online; Bacon's Great Instauration; Bacon's Advancement of Learning; Shakespeare’s
Plays Online; Shakespeare Links;
Scientific backdrop: The Ptolemaic Cosmos; The Copernican Revolution;
Web Resources for the study of Modernity ; Bacon
“as” Shakespeare a list of “his”
works, including some masques; Thomas More, Utopia in Three Modern
Utopias.
5/20 New
Atlantis cont’d. Discussion;
Images: George Romney: George
Romney: The Tempest Act I, Scene; William
Hogarth: Prospero & Miranda; Begin Shakespeare, The Tempest. Background
Texts: The
Works of Sir Francis Bacon; Descartes' Meditations;
Descartes:
Discourse on Method (e-text) .
Week
II
5/25 Complete Shakespeare, Tempest . Additional readings: Discussion: The Tempest &
Forbidden Planet. Library Reading: Barbara A. Mowat,
“Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare
Quarterly Vol. 52 No. 1 (Spring 2001), pp. 1-33 (http://www.jstor.org/pss/3648645).
5/27 Begin Shelley, Frankenstein. Response
1 Due; Film: from Caliban to Frankenstein
(1931); Tempest complete; Online
Reading: Descartes'
Meditations II.
Week III
6/1 Shelly, Frankenstein, complete;
Additional Readings: Donna Haraway, The
Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others
at Hyperlink
to Haraway; additional: Foucault, Preface
to The Order of Things ; Foucault on Las Meninas.
6/3 Shelly, Frankenstein, Haraway, Foucault, cont’d; Discussion: the
art of the critical essay.
Week IV
6/8 Film: Chaplin, Modern Times; . Response 2 Due . Additional Readings: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; Photography by Eugene Atget (cited by Benjamin);
Recommended: Theodor Adorno, "Chaplin Times Two". Film, photography and
painting: Raphael, Miraculous Draught of Fishes;
cited by Benjamin as precursors to film:
Dadaist art by Hans Arp
(1867-1966), Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and others: Dada
and Surrealism; poetry by August Stramm (1874-1915),
in the original auf Deutsch: a poem and a
note on Benjamin’s Spielraum.
6/10 Gibson, Neuromancer;
Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulations"; Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology;
Online Readings: Donna Haraway, AA
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century; see Hyperlink
to Haraway; The
plight of the pelican is the poignant symbol of this disaster - Americas, World
- The Independent.
Week V
6/15 Film: Blade Runner, discussion, Blade Runner & Neuromancer.
Recommended: NYT Review of
“Entropy”; Pynchon Criticism Online; "Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties
Memoir"
; Babies of Wackiness: A Reader's Guide to Vineland; Weblinks
for Vineland;
readings from The Education of Henry Adams, chapter XXV:
“The Dynamo and The Virgin,” as well as the last three chapters of the book if
you have time, XXXIII, XXXIV, XXXV; Pynchon,
AEntropy,@ (from Slow
Learner, BB);
6/17 Discussion; Essay III Due. Vonnegut,
Slapstick. Comedy, Entropy, and Technology; Chaplin revisited; BB Reading: Martha
Nussbaum, “Skills for Life.”
Week VI
6/22 Presentations & Discussion. Group 1:
Becky & Bryan; Group 2: Darrin, Hannah, & Kelly
6/24 Presentations & Discussion; Final Papers Due in duplicate; Group 3: Richard, Nick, Jory; Group 4: Zeke & Javier
