Culture and Technology
This class will look at the interplay between technology and culture with a particular focus on the ways in which technological advancements impact cultural production in literature, the arts, and media.
- Day:Monday
- Times: 6:30pm - 9:30pm CST
- Dates: Starting Jan 8
Taught by:
About the Course
In this course, we will explore the impacts of technology on culture. How does technology affect our understanding of ourselves as human beings? How does it change the way we perceive, imagine, think, remember, desire or fear? How does technology affect our taste, our aesthetic sense of what is beautiful or ugly? To begin to answer such questions, we will read and view works that explicitly discuss or thematize technology: philosophical approaches to the subject by Plato, Heidegger, Benjamin, Henry Adams, Paul Valéry; André Bazin, Glenn Gould, Friedrich Kittler, Foucault, and Sianne Ngai; science fiction such as Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix; the Futurist movement celebrating speed and electricity. But we will also be exploring the implications of the fact that works of art – regardless of whether they are explicitly about technology — are themselves created by technologies, whether the pen or printing press, paintbrush or camera, piano or synthesizer. What then happens to painting when photography emerges? What happens to motion pictures when television emerges? What happens to popular music with the advent of 8-track recording? How might Chat-GPT change what writers of novels or screenplays produce?
This class will satisfy the following curriculum requirement:
- Tech and Society Elective
About the Professor
Lawrence Rothfield
Larry Rothfield is an associate professor in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, and is a research affiliate in the Cultural Policy Center. His research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism, and other cultural activities are caught up within epistemic and political struggles.
Larry Rothfield is an associate professor in the Department of English, Department of Comparative Literature, and is a research affiliate in the Cultural Policy Center. His research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism, and other cultural activities are caught up within epistemic and political struggles.