Cyborg Genealogies: the Gothic
Professor William B. Warner
The Gothic turn:In the era of the French revolution audiences began to enjoy reading in order to feel terror. At the center of this development is what we call the "gothic"—a spectacularly popular form of fiction which took Protestant readers back into dangerous European cultural spaces of crypts, bodies, magic and danger. Since the 18th century it has emerged as one of the most influential forms of modern entertainment. Of particular interest to us are those gothic monsters that anticipate the modern cyborg.
The Cyborg turn: Cyborg is an abbreviation for "cybernetic organism", that is, a living creature that processes information. The term was first coined in the 1950s in the wake of the development of cybernetics, an interdisciplinary approach to the study of information. But it came into wide use through popular films like Alien, Terminator and Blade Runner. It became an important coordinate of cultural theory with the publication of Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto."
By splicing together the study of the modern cyborg with the gothic monster, Cyborg Genealogies: the Gothic will study a selective group of novels and films and theoretical texts so as to trace the modern cyborg back to the gothic monster. This course will will probe the meaning of the intersection between the gothic genre and the onset of technologies that make the cyborg thinkable.
