Course Syllabus (W19 Online) COLI 331T--Television Culture: "Lens, Mirror, Screen: Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR"

Abstract

Course Description: Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell's 1984, view Michael Radford's filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics of identity formation, resistance, and social revolution? How does it inform and/or intersect with rhetorical and aesthetic experience? Or, again, how does it structure time, space, production and consumption? How does it determine practices of producing and consuming goods and services? Alluding to McLuhan, what is the status of subjects, objects, and things in the context of television as 'medium' and 'message'? How does television construct and/or deconstruct memory and history.?