Reality Check: Modes of Reality and Representation in the Age of Cyberculture

In an age when phantasmal projections on the computer and smart phone screens rule our daily lives and disembodied fragments of our audio-visual/textual representations fly around the globe, the question of "what is real and how is one to know what is real" weighs us down with an ever-pressing urgency. This course explores different modes of reality and their literary representations that make ontological and epistemological inquiries into the concept and nature of the "real".  Readings include novels and short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Neil Stephenson and Murakami Haruki, and films (Ghost in the Shell, Inception). In English.