English 248-002
Literature and Contemporary Life: Technobodies: The Body in the Technology Age
Instr: Ogburn, Cara
Office: CRT 529; 229-2972
e-mail: ceogburn@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 2:00-3:15pm; AUP 116
Course Description
This class will consider the status of the body in the digital, global, technological age. Often in post-humanist theory the body is ignored, deferred, read as simply "jacked-in"; this, however, ignores the implications these technologies do in fact have on material bodies. Similarly, this age is marked by a variety of body technologies-reproductive technologies, body modification technologies, sex technologies, cosmetic surgeries and gender reassignment surgeries-all of which overlap and re-constitute what it might mean to be some body in the contemporary age.
Questions of identity, race, class and gender are of course crucial to these questions of postdigital embodiment. We will consider these as we try to think about the contemporary age by situating it in histories of body technologies as well as thinking about the implications of simply complying with these new technologies which seem so liberatory.
This class will be writing intensive. There will be weekly response papers to the reading as well as longer papers.
Reading List (tentative):
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Dawn, Octavia Butler
Stonebutch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
Assorted Hypertexts (such as Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl) Critical Posthumanist Works (including, for example, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Jean Beaudrillard, Critical Art Ensemble).
