Contenu
Drawing on modern and contemporary theorists, this seminar will explore how various media and technologies shape the production and reception of literature and the arts. From gramophone, radio, television and cinema, to digital media, virtual reality, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence – how do these ever-more numerous 'extensions of man' (McLuhan) mediate our relations to ourselves and our worlds? How do our strange 'technological' familiars - doubles and avatars of the so-called 'organic/original' human – shape our ways of looking, listening and perceiving ourselves and our productions? How might they also open the possibility of a new, organic and technological hybrid (post)human, a 'humanity' liberated from the organic, mechanical and biological limits of what the metaphysical poet John Donne (1572-1631) called, following the medieval legend of Beowulf, « the bone’s cage », namely, the body ?
From the technologies of the early 20th century that transformed man into what Freud called a 'prosthetic God,' through the use of media in the 60s- 90s to extend notions of bodily difference inspired by the sexual liberation movements, to the turn in contemporary art towards explorations of humours, viruses, secretions, and grafts, implants, and digital enhancement, this course will explore the strange symbiosis of art and technology.
