Professor Lidia Levkovitch
What does it mean to be sentient? To have free will? To be human? To be alive? How can we ethically interact with the Other that embodies some, but not all, of those concepts, the Other we cannot hope to fully understand? And what kind of society can be built by individuals whose very self-definition is in constant flux? Questions such as these seem to be on everyone’s mind as humanity grapples with proliferation of artificial intelligence, but their roots certainly go much deeper. Even when the technology that forms the fabric of today’s reality existed only in intellectual paradoxes and thought experiments, the imagination of artists and thinkers who pondered those hypotheticals was shaped by philosophical, moral, social, and political challenges of their times. In Russian and Eastern European Science Fiction, we will explore a literary genre that flourished in Russia and the Soviet bloc alongside real-life endeavors to build a utopian society and create a “new human” through revolution and technological progress. As we experience iconic works by artists such as Evgeny Zamiatin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Karel Čapek, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanislaw Lem, we might be struck by the prescience with which some of them predict the future. We will also focus on the present that the creators had to contend with, following the socialist experiment through “the long 20th century,” from its violent origins to its stagnation and collapse with its aftermath.
No prerequisites; all readings and discussions in English. Fulfills Core requirement AHo.
Cross-listed with Comparative Literature