MLU
Seminar: Narratives of Future Worlds - Vertiefungsmodul - Details
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General information

Course name Seminar: Narratives of Future Worlds - Vertiefungsmodul
Course number ANG.04629.02
Semester SS 2020
Current number of participants 13
maximum number of participants 20
Home institute Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
Courses type Seminar in category Offizielle Lehrveranstaltungen
First date Tuesday, 07.04.2020 10:00 - 12:00
Studiengänge (für) ANG.04629.02 für LAG, LAS, LAF (2012+2015), MA Englische Sprache und Literatur 45/75 LP (2015), MA Angloam. Lit., Sprache und Kultur 120 LP (2015)
SWS 2

Rooms and times

No room preference
Tuesday: 10:00 - 12:00, weekly

Module assignments

Comment/Description

Difficult to define, science fiction usually invites us to imagine future worlds and explore a wide variety of issues, including politics and social order (utopian and dystopian science fiction), scientific and technological innovations (e.g., social engineering, artificial humans and robots, artificial intelligence), gender roles, and extraterrestrial life. Often science fiction serves as an imaginary foil to criticize contemporary societies and tries to appeal to our “sense of wonder.” In this course, we will analyze and interpret science fiction primarily in the form of literature and film (i.e., movies and TV series) and discuss, among other issues, the relationships among humans (race, class, gender) and between humans and the other / Other (human clones, artificial humans, and radically different aliens): What does it mean to be human? What can a diverse society look like? Do we need an ethics for robots and aliens? Our corpus will include classic science fiction texts and recent science fiction movies and TV series, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968; basis of the 1982 movie Blade Runner and its 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049), Octavia A. Butler’s Dawn (1987), and the HBO TV series Westworld (2016-). We will also work together with Dr. Silke Berndsen (MLU library, Steintor) and create an exhibition for Die Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften 2020 (now set for July 3, but this could change). In order to prepare us for this task, she will give two in-class presentations and workshops on „How to plan an exhibition?“ and “How to create a virtual exhibition.“

Admission settings

The course is part of admission "Beschränkte Teilnehmendenanzahl: VM Amer".
The following rules apply for the admission:
  • A defined number of seats will be assigned to these courses.
    The seats will be assigned in order of enrolment.