230640 Other(s‘) Eyes – Humans, Nonhumans, and the Horror within (S) (WiSe 2015/2016)

‘But’, said I. ‘These things – these animals talk!’
− H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

Contemporary fictional media allow us to meet intelligent sharks, cooperating zombies, aliens and various forms of artificial intelligence. What seems to unite these different semantic fields, be it classic horror fiction, be it far less sophisticated adventure mainstream productions like Trevorrows Jurassic World (2015), is one pressing question haunting us − the question of the animal (Derrida 34), the animal we face and the animal we like to think of as hidden in the past of our human self.
If culture and mind have long been distinction categories to the nonhuman world, scientific development in biology as well as in robotics now raises new questions regarding human and nonhuman forms of existence. When it comes to concepts of humans versus “others”, we are confronted with different politics, industries and more and more blurred boundaries.
Fictional media from novels to story-based computer games mirror these troubles in (sometimes more, sometimes less) encoded ways.
This course studies patterns of animal representation through a focus lens of posthumanism and anthropology. Examples for analysis will include film, literature and art, while looking specifically (although not exclusively) at horror fiction.