LCC3314- Technologies of Representation

Description | Syllabus & Schedule | Requirements | Texts

Course Description

This course explores the development of technologies of representation and asks what we can learn either from the way they were used and experienced in earlier periods as well as how we experience and articulate our own experience of evolving media. While the course gives attention to the history of a range of media including electronic sound recording and film, it will focus attention on the development of technologies that that allow us to explore emerging ideas of cognition and cognitive science. Course reading and research will examine ideas surrounding the origin of writing and geometry and the development of practices associated with scroll, codex, and book. Work on the evolution of printing technologies will include study of related graphic technologies such as woodcuts, engraving, and etching. The final portion of the course will deal the emergence of photography and digital technologies.

Course Requirements

Grades for the course will be determined by:

• four short papers (60%)
• a final take-home examination (25%)
• class-participation (15%)
  

Texts

Required Texts

• Augustine, Confessions (New York: Penguin, 1968)
• Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter (Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999)
• Timothy Lenoir, ed. Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Palo Alto:   Stanford  Univ. Press, 1999)
• George Myerson, Heidegger, Habermas and the Mobile Phone (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001)
• Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 2002 [1982]

There are also online and recommended text materials for this course. Please check course syllabus for complete information.