Fiction from Film to Internet

HASS INQR 1550

Fall 2023

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Course Description

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” This is the foreboding first sentence of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), perhaps the most influential science fiction novel of the past 40 years. Neuromancer anticipated a future in which life is lived increasingly in the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace and the “real” world is mediated by mass culture, entertainment technology, and corporations.

In their relatively short but profound histories, the Internet—not to mention other entertainment technologies—has transformed literature, art, and culture at every level, from production, circulation, and reception to consumption. How have literature and art imagined the Internet and its adjacent technologies? And how, in turn, have those technologies reshaped what we consider to be distinctly artistic and literary objects?

To begin answering these questions, this course offers a small survey of fiction, film, TV, streaming, and criticism that span the early days of the Internet to the present day of the extremely online. This course will help you develop core skills in composition, interpreting literary and cultural texts of all sorts, and articulating your original arguments and ideas. Its assignments will also prompt you to reflect critically on, and more deliberately engage with, your online life and its impacts on your educational, cultural, and material lives.

Required Texts