Course description
Fantastic Places, Unhuman Humans: Exploring Humanity Through Literature
Can you be confident that the person sitting next to you on the bus is really a human rather than some remarkable replica conjured up by a mad scientist or, perhaps, an alien from another planet? What evidence is needed to conclude that the person casually looking at her mobile device is human? What, after all, distinguishes us humans from unhumans? Is there something unique about our brains, our external features, our consciousness, or our imaginations? How have we constructed the conceptual boundary between what we qualify as human and what we categorize as robotic, animal, android, or alien? What, in the end, makes the human “human”?
Join me as we dive into these and related questions in a distinctive way through the gamified structure of this course. Using simple tools, you’ll create your own avatar and begin a virtual journey led by a humanoid and professor through various imaginative realms.
Your travels will be brought to virtual life by literature and made visible on the course map. Your assignments and readings will be quests that concentrate on integral parts of a story, and themes that run throughout the duration of the course. These quests challenge you to do things such as produce visualizations (graphs, word clouds, network diagrams, etc.) utilizing easy-to-use online tools, capture interpretations through art, and engage in battles with characters from the readings.
Upcoming start dates
Who should attend?
Prerequisites
None
Course delivery details
This course is offered through Brown University, a partner institute of EdX.
2-3 hours per week
Costs
- Verified Track -$49
- Audit Track - Free
Certification / Credits
What you'll learn
- Conceive of difficulties that arise when trying to define and distinguish between humans and unhuman monsters.
- Identify problems that grow out of the effort to apply definitive and universal moral judgments to actions, thoughts, social structures, and/or living beings.
- Explore challenges that grow out of the effort to define what constitutes the categories of “nature” and “natural.”
- Consider multiple interpretations of literary works by leveraging alternative tools like computer-generated visualizations.
- Present your insights in an engaging, coherent, organized, and focused form through the use of literary analysis.
- Produce creative responses to literature that engage and challenge the themes and express new viewpoints into the conversation.
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edX
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