Electives in the English Department

Hacker Culture traces the rise of hacker culture from its earliest incarnations in the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT and the Homebrew Computer Club at Stanford to the cybercollective Anonymous. We study literary and cinematic representations of hackers and hacking to identify anxieties about technology, the Cold War, globalization, consumer culture, and the Information Age. Dwelling with the cultural touchstones that inform hacker culture itself, we define the ethical and political issues that hacker culture incites.

Classic Science Fiction is an introduction to the origins and history of science fiction. We read classic works of sf, engage with critical writing on the genre, and trace the evolution of some of sf's central themes and concerns in literature and cinema.

M.A. Seminars

The 9/11 Novel explores the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Widely been described as the inversion of the relation of fiction and reality, the attacks challenge the medium of the novel, which has traditionally been viewed as a site where the relations between the mind and the world, fantasy and reality, fiction and history, can be worked out. Keeping these issues in mind, we read novels written about and in the wake of 9/11, tracing the evolution from an initial discourse of trauma and tremendum to a critical engagement with memory and history in an international context.

Image/Culture traces the origins of contemporary image culture by following the evolution of the image, and its relationship to the real, as analog reproduction gave way to digitality in the final decades of the 20th century. Focusing on novels that stage excessive or improper relationships with photographs, fame, and digital footage from the Holocaust to the terror attacks of 9/11, we explore what it means to live in an age of digital media, social media, and deepfake technology, when lived experience is inextricable from its represented image, "facts" and "truths" are multiple, various, and hackable, and our intimate relationship with the image--onscreen, online, and in a literary text--is the site where our most immediate senses and concepts are formed and deformed.

Amirim Honors Program

Representing Violence, a 3rd year seminar in the Amirim honors program, explores the modalities of violence in a range of forms and contexts to reflect on how violence, and its representation, function as a site where our relations with ourselves, our relations with others, and our interactions with society can be productively, and creatively, revised.