 Submit research essay prospectus (by 2/12)
 Read AR Ammons “Garbage” & Buell’s “Toxic
Discourse”
 View Toxic & Burtynsky photographs

 Group projects
 Research essay
 Neuromancer Discussion, part 2
Cyberspace, “The meat,” and the place of nature

“The focus of this digital humanities experiment is on the design of
the project, rather than on the completeness or perfection of its execution. You will be evaluated on how well you collaborate, involve each member of the group, outline your research question and methodology, and “test out” an alternative methodology for the literary analysis of an environmental question or problem.”
Feb. 1 st : Research question + methodology posted on blog
Feb. 15 th : Progress report in class
March 1 st : “Final” project uploaded to blog

Mash-up of
“Garbage”
Kate
Rob
Ashley
Christy
Tag Crowd
Of Neuromancer
Parker
Veronica
Pam
Sarah
Mapping
“The Hungry
Tide”
Taylor
Amanda
Stephen
Crystine
Tag Clouds
Neuromancer +
Political Rhetoric
Sam
Martina
TJ & Andrew

“Write a research essay of 15 pages, double-spaced that draws on 10 secondary sources and demonstrates a sustained analysis with at least
2 primary texts. The primary texts are your primary objects of
analysis/inquiry; they can take the form of poetry, drama, fiction, epoetry/efiction, film, new media narrative or art, music / audio recordings, etc. You should bring to your primary sources both your prior training as a literary critic as well as any new method(s) of analysis/research you’d like to test out and further develop.
The main requirement is that you craft a topic that relates to one of our course questions…”

 Geographies: Urban / outer / cyber spaces
The end of nature? The trouble with wilderness?
 “The meat”: Embodiment, materiality + the environmental upshot of posthumanism

“The sheer material expansiveness of the metropolis, which in Neuromancer extends even into the extraterrestrial orbit of Freeside [. . .] is matched in another sense by the ubiquity of urban experience. It is this that
[Fredric] Jameson has in mind when he remarks upon the complementary ‘disappearance of Nature.’” (Myers 890)
- Tony Myers, “The Postmodern Imaginary in Neuromancer,” MFS
(2001)

“Cyberspace is created by transforming a data matrix into a landscape in which narratives can happen [….] data are humanized, and subjectivity is computerized.” - Hayles, How
We Became Posthuman
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. [….] Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.” -Haraway, “The Cyborg
Manifesto”

“The posthuman implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed.”
-Hayles, How We Became Posthuman

“Much work in the field of ecocriticism, established in American literary studies during the 1990s, assumes that the natural world is endangered, and that some of the human activities that threaten nature also put human health and life at risk. [...] My argument focuses on a particular type of risk—exposure to chemical substances [...] This focus allows me to foreground how my argument builds upon Buell's earlier analyses of toxic discourse but also how contemporary novelists use chemical substances as a trope for the blurring of boundaries between body and environment, public and domestic space, and harmful and beneficial technologies.”
-Heise, “Toxins, Drugs + Global Systems”

HRP-4C Fembot, Industrial Technology Research Inst.

Blade Runner poster (1982)
Adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s
1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Geographies
The sprawl
Tokyo (Chiba – Ninsei)
Freeside / Zion
Villa Straylight
Cyberspace
The matrix
Technologies
Decks
Prostheses
Nerve slicing
Eye replacements
Polycarbon suits
Simstim
Sense / Net
ICE/ icebre aker
Characters
Case, Molly (razor girl), Armitage/Colonel Corto,
Peter Riviera, Julius Deane, Linda Lee, The Finn,
Maelcum, Dixie Flatline/McCoy Pauley, Panther
Moderns, Lady 3Jane / Marie-France Tessier-
Ashpool, Wintermute AI, Neuromancer AI