Time Travels
What are our clocks measuring? How has our relationship with and use of time changed in a world that keeps getting faster? In this course we will explore the notion of time from multiple disciplinary perspectives, which will offer the opportunity to study and discuss different conventions of writing, as well as the different questions and treatments of time relevant to each discipline. As students of writing, we will begin by analyzing works of fiction which feature imaginative representations of time and time travel, challenging the conventional, unidirectional metaphors (time compared to a river, for example) by which time is characterized. Continuing on to philosophical texts, which strive for logical and systematic definitions of temporal phenomena, we will consider questions about the nature of time itself: is it an objective substance, or a matter of relativity and convention? Is it continuous, or composed of discrete, indivisible moments? Paradoxes associated with our definitions of time and time travel will also be investigated. Scientific works will allow us to trace the treatment of time in the world of physics, from Newton’s laws to Einstein’s space-time to recent investigations into black holes and wormholes. We will discuss what science has to say about the physical possibility of time travel. We will then turn to temporal concerns of cultural theorists, who are interested in how time affects us on a day-to-day level in our social interactions, and who claim that accelerating technologies (high speed internet, instant messaging) have made us ever more impatient. The delay between the event and its representation in the media has all but been erased: books about a presidency appear during that president’s term; presidential primary polls scramble to forecast a winner before the votes have been counted; members of congress and celebrities “Twitter” about their lives as they are living them, so we can receive moment-to-moment updates. How is our understanding of the world and each other affected?
Weekly writing assignments, drafted and discussed in a workshop environment, will offer us the opportunity to develop close reading and assessment skills in order to construct analytical arguments. There will be two longer multi-stage essays, both of which will draw from the weekly assignments: in the first you will develop an argument which contrasts two or more fictional texts/films we have studied in terms of their treatment of time; in the second, longer essay, you will incorporate outside research in conjunction with the theoretical texts we have explored in order to examine a topic of your choosing and discuss its temporal assumptions and implications.
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