English 487 - Rhetorics of New Media

(Offered as ENGL 487 and FAMS 453.)  Digital technologies tend to be described as absolutely new, without any precedent in history or culture.  But these technologies are just the latest to have shaped culture, as well as the many ways that we talk about culture.  Ours is a complex present, filled by technologies that are brand new as well as devices and artforms that survive from earlier periods of innovation.  In this way, videogames and surveillance systems coexist with books and movies, and technophobes share their world with technophiles.  In this course, we will read literature (both print and electronic), watch films, and discuss games and art, while exploring cultural and political theory that spans the past half-century.  Is there progressive potential in the trend toward computerization?  Or contrarily, in what ways might technophilia and technocracy obstruct the betterment of society?  We’ll take up these and related questions, and study the legitimating language by which the increasingly digital world has come to make sense.  From this rhetorical and historical perspective, we’ll address topics ranging from globalization to media “evolution,” the aesthetics of code, the newness of new media, technics-out-of-control, gamification of war, technologies of race and gender, and the ideology of computationalism.

Open to juniors and seniors.  Limited to 15 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Professor Tierney.