ENGL 162
Robots, Puppets, and Dolls Fall 2014
Division I Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

Is Chucky alive? How about Barbie, or Furby? This course explores the persistent human habit of animating simulacra (robots, puppets, and dolls; but also automata, replicants, and cyborgs): a process which in turn animates us, even as it blurs the borders of our identities. We’ll study such figures as they appear in art, literature, and film over the last two centuries. Students will also attend a puppet theater, and will work directly with “reborn” dolls and with therapy robots, framing their work with readings in artificial intelligence, neurology (Sacks on human puppets), and psychoanalysis (Freud on the uncanny; Winnicott on transitional objects). Throughout, we will wonder: why this fascination with the almost living? Why do we care more for Wall-E (or for Addy or the Terminator) than we do for so many real people?
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1432
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: frequent ungraded exercises; five essays of increasing length and complexity (twenty pages in total); a willingness to experiment with formats and argumentation; active participation
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the Gaudino option
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: first-year students who have not taken or placed out of a 100-level English course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills

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