Sunday, February 19, 2012

Prompts for Thursday the 23rd

Option #1:  Use Haraway's essay to interpret and evaluation some aspect of Molly's character.  This reading should engage with Haraway as a feminist thinker, and should read Molly, in some way, in terms of feminism (anti-feminism, post-feminism, whatever).  To put it another way:  how can we use the confluence of Molly and Haraway to think about (argue about) the future of gender?


I'm asking you to focus on Molly, but if you want to write about Case as being in some sense feminized, I'd be fine with that too.  Writing about Case-as-woman might be more complex and demanding than writing about Molly-as-woman, though.


Option #2:  Make an argument which interprets one of the "transcendental" (I want you to be thinking about whether they are transcendental or not, at least) entities of the novel - Wintermute most obviously, although the other AI or even the corporation itself might be valid alternatives - through Heidegger, Marcuse, Haraway, or some combination of the above.


Some question you might consider include:  does Wintermute (or some other form of transcendence) fundamentally change the structure of Gibson's rabidly capitalist (very likely one-dimensional) world?  Does Wintermute pose a true challenge to the existing order, or does it perpetuate it?  And, of course, what does that mean for us?  Does Wintermute represent something back in the "real world"?



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