ENG 4934 Spring 2018 Kilgore

From films such as Star Wars (1977) and Blade Runner (1982) to albums such as Parliament’s Mothership Connection (1975) and Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine (1978), from philosophical texts such as Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) and Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto (1984) to science-fiction/fantasy novels such as Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the idea that we are living in a posthuman age—a hyperreal, extraterrestrial, cyborg age—becomes a cultural dominant in the years 1975-1985. Or at least, that’s the wager of this course. We will explore the rise of posthumanism in fiction, film, and music, covering topics/genres such as Afrofuturism, space opera, technofeminism, alien horror, cyberpunk, and posthuman apocalypse.