English

... which supply natural resources and food, are becoming similarly toxic – places marred by 'malaria, flooding, drought, rogue crop genomes ... Jay Clayton's comparative study of Frankenstein and the representation of artificial humanoids in contemporary art forms (such as Blade ...

Economides builds a case for wonder’s central importance within romanticism, arguing that its political ethos reflects values associated with the beautiful rather than the sublime in aesthetic theory of the period. Moreover, she takes issue with Philip Fisher’s assertion that wonder is unavoidably elegiac in romantic literature by contrasting the status of this aesthetic in William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s writing. Although Wordsworth typically associates wonder with lost childhood innocence, Coleridge’s association of wonder with an open-ended quest for knowledge leads him to emphasize its enduring importance within adult perspectives on art and politics.

This chapter introduces the central project of this book: the recovery of a sense of how wonder’s political and ecological meanings differ from those associated with sublimity. Economides argues that, contrary to most romantic and green scholarship, wonder should not be conflated with sublimity because it is a way of experiencing the more-than-human world that is mobilized by pleasurable awe and open-ended inquiry rather than by fear and violence. After examining the causes of sublimity’s hegemony in recent theory, Economides surveys wonder’s ethical and ecological significance within the works of contemporary philosophers.

Returning to a focus on ways wonder represents an alternative to sublimity. Economides addresses the question of whether wonder toward nature is still possible within the context of our hypermediated culture. Taking issue with eco-phenomenologists who argue that language and technology destroy our capacity for wonder. Economides argues that poetic applications of these modes of technē can actually augment our ability to experience nature as wondrous. She contrasts the non-anthropocentric wonder inspired by ecopoetry and by nature documentaries such as Planet Earth with the hubristic wonder associated with bioengineering, the latter being a form of what Heidegger would term “enframing” (domination). Moreover, she argues that Merleau-Ponty’s account of wonder’s relationship with language and technē represents an ecologically progressive answer to blind spots evident in Heidegger’s phenomenology.

Contrary to stereotypes regarding romanticism’s uniform hostility towards science, writing of the period reflects how technology inspired both wonder and an emergent sense of the “technological sublime.” Economides investigates the gender dynamics associated with both of these responses, arguing that wonder entails a gender-neutral celebration of technological innovation in contrast to the gendered ethos of domination that underwrites the technological sublime. Anna Barbauld’s poetic celebrations of technological marvels and concurrent anxiety regarding potentially exploitative applications of science are contrasted with William Wordsworth’s valorization of the technological sublime. Economides also examines Mary Shelley’s rigorous deconstruction of the technological sublime in Frankenstein, exploring how the novel reveals ideological links between Kantian aesthetics and the technological sublime’s celebration of reason’s triumph over (feminized) objects of sense.

Economides examines the technological sublime’s environmental legacy in this chapter, asserting that high-tech global capitalism’s unintended by-products (including large-scale pollution) have inspired a new and terrifying locus of properly environmental sublimity in contemporary art. Contrary to previous modes of sublimity, the environmental sublime does not valorize human reason, but instead traces a profound irrationality underpinning consumer society. However, rather than mobilizing reform, the environmental sublime reflects an ambivalent politics whose most distinguishing feature is melancholy. Economides illustrates ways the environmental sublime is evoked in postmodern art such as DeLillo’s White Noise and Hayes’s The Rime of the Modern Mariner, and contrasts the loss elegized in such texts with that registered in romantic works such as Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Office Hours: Monday, 2:30-4 pm Office: Humanities 350 Course Description: In this course, we will examine the landscape of the American West from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, using literature, art, film, and history to raise and analyze a number of key questions. Through readings, class discussions, and written responses on a variety of styles and genres of texts, we will explore a range of cultural expressions that reveal the changes in how we think of the land around us from the 1800s to today. We will start by examining the variety of ways authors explore relationships between human and non-human nature. Then, in order to learn more about the places we live we'll put the tools of nature writing-observation, memory, exploration, research, analysis, and expression-to work. We'll ask questions such as: How do relationships between humans and their environments reflect and shape literature? How do gender, race, ethnicity, and class shape an author's standpoint toward the natural world? What is the relationship between nature and culture? What alternative views of nature (and culture) are possible? How does our attitude toward nature affect our reading of literature? What is the purpose and importance of writing about nature? Through examining these issues, the political consequences of how we view the land around us will start to emerge, and we will move on explore topics and themes such as cowboy mythologies, Native American and Chicano/a cultural identity, environmentalism, urbanism, and tourism. In looking at a wide selection of fiction, film, historical documents, and theory, we will investigate the ways in which writers deal with gender, sexuality, and a variety of political themes in representations of Western landscapes. This course will build on the abilities you developed in English 101 and 102 and push your abilities to construct an argument and analyze scholarly materials even further. By the end of the semester, you will have had ample opportunities to improve your skills to create polished and compelling analyses and argumentative essays. This course will be writing, reading, and research intensive, and students will be expected to actively participate in class discussions about the assigned texts and films. In addition to short response papers, you will prepare major papers which include a literary analysis, a film critique, and a critical historical essay based on the assigned readings.

There are debates whether Pedophilia, a universal psycho-social problem, is a psychiatric disorder or a perverse sexual orientation. Though a few number of pedophilia supporting groups argue that having sexual interests in children is merely a sexual orientation or fantasy, but this paper explores further in analyzing different psychological insights of pedophiles, especially in the contexts of Vladimir Nobokov’s novel Lolita (1955) and its film adaptation of 1962. This paper gives a critical analysis of the views and practices of pedophilia in the contemporary world. In addition to that, this paper explores the binary opposite characters of Humbert and Clare Quilty to determine whether pedophilia is their sexual orientation or they are perverts who are only sexually attracted to young girls. Apart from analyzing this perverse sexual practice, this paper also discusses the established notions of pedophilia, re/de-constructs them and gives an elaborate discussion on this taboo topic from theoretical points of view. In doing so, this paper employs critical commentaries based on a number of established theories like Michel Foucault’s theories on Sexuality, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Laura Mulvey’s envision of scopophilia.

This paper attempts a cybercritical reading of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer (1984) to explore the genesis of cyborgs in the novel, address issues pertaining to cyberpunks and scrutinize the portrayal of a cyberculture set in the futuristic dystopian city of Chiba. The relationship between humans and machines has gone through multiple phases of changes in the recent past. That is why instead of satirizing machinized-humans, science fiction writers have embraced different dimensions of man-machine relationships during the past few decades. 'Cyborg' is no longer represented as the 'mutation of human capabilities', but as 'machines with Artificial Intelligence'. Gibson's Neuromancer, a landmark piece of literary work in the sphere of Sci-Fi literature, specifically predicts a new height of man-machine relationship by employing both human and cyborg characters at the center of his story line. This paper shows how Gibson accurately prophesizes the matrix of machine-human relationship in his novel. It also explores Gibson's depiction of female characters through the lens of cyberfeminist theories. In view of that, this paper uses contemporary critical and cultural theories including Donna Haraway's idea of cyberfeminism, Baudrillard's simulation and simulacra, Foucauldian discourse analysis, Jeremy Bentham's concept of tabula rasa and other relevant theoretical ideas to examine and evaluate the transformative changes.