Postgraduate Units of Study
GRMN6904 - German Literature and Culture 2
Semester 1, 2011 | Credit Points: 6
Coordinator: Yixu Lu
Phone: +61 2 9351 3293
Email: yixu.lu@sydney.edu.au
Description
Cyborgs, designer babies, clones, artificial intelligence - today's mass media is crowded with artificial humans. Far from being just a recent phenomenon, the artificial creation of human life is an eternal dream of humankind. This course considers the motif of the artificial human from the early myths (Prometheus, Pygmalion, Golem, etc.) to its manifestations in contemporary literature, including the famous silent film Metropolis. We will analyze a selection of poems dealing with the tradition of this motif (poems by Goethe, Droste-Hülshoff, Dischereit etc.); in addition, we will examine Hoffman's popular romantic story about a young man falling in love with a puppet. Next we will discuss an early socio-critical science fiction movie about the 'woman-machine' Maria, and finally we will be investigating two contemporary works dealing with reproductive cloning and human clones.
Assessments
1x4000-5000wd essay (100%)
Classes
1x2-hr seminar/week
A timetable is not available for this session.
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