English 4 - Winter, 2013

Critical Inquiry & Literature

Topic: The Rise of the Machine: Technologies of Representation and Representations of Technology

Class Information

Instructor: Wilson-Bates, Tobias
CRN: 52590
Time: MW 10:00-11:50
Location: 248 Voorhies

Description

 There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.
-Mario Savio


Savio's quote is as absolutely pertinent now as when he said it in
1964, however, it makes an elision that has become common practice in modern thought, namely, that "the machine" as it operates in the most abstract sense is a stand-in for a system of military and economic repression. This concept takes root in a tradition that is articulated in its earlier form by Karl Marx in Capital, Volume I: "The contest between the capitalist and the wage-labourer dates back to the very origin of capital. It raged on throughout the whole manufacturing period. But only since the introduction of machinery has the workman fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material
embodiment of capital."

This class will seek to construct a genealogy of the mechanical thought from its earlier iteration as a discussion of mechanism articulated by Descartes and Locke to the late twentieth-century science fiction of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner [1982]. While the course will also make forays earlier to Shakespeare's Coriolanus as an example of the trans-historical existence of concerns about mechanization, ultimately the class will take the nineteenth century and the contested themes of the first and second industrial revolution as its center of gravity.

Students will be encouraged to relate the concerns of these texts to
the rhetoric deployed in contemporary economic, social, and political discourses. The various projects in the course will also challenge the students to engage mechanical and industrial narratives as they exist across various forms of media in today's technology saturated environment.

Grading

Attendance and Participation: 15%
Homework: 10%
Technology Forums: 10%
Paper 1: 5%
Paper 2: 15%
Paper 3: 15%
Paper 4: 15%
Final Exam 15%

Texts

Blade Runner
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Frankenstein
Coriolanus
The Time Machine
Additional excerpts in course reader