HON 398A - HONORS Tutorial, The Posthuman Condition

Prerequisite, admission to the University Honors program. Honors Tutorial: Each Honors Tutorial focuses attention on an important thinker, idea, or concept in-depth so as to supplement and enhance a liberal arts education. Individual course topics are chosen by the Instructor and may or may not repeat, and students may take as many Tutorials as they like. Topics already selected include Populism, Historical Memory, Descartes, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.” The world finds itself in a moment of intense reality, where the belief in human exceptionalism is undergoing a necessary, critical scrutiny. What makes a person human? What makes a person exceptional? What if humans are not the world’s principal actors, but instead the effects of a complex network of non-human entities? Through an immersion in a variety of “texts” and discourses-critical theory, literature, cinema and television, and even video games-this HONORS Tutorial will interrogate the rhetoric (re)examining and (re)inventing human and nonhuman being, developing students’ critical inquiry into the frameworks of our perceived reality, its problematic opacities, and its potential for subversion. Letter grade. (Offered as needed.) 1 credit