TTS Practice | Curricula | Course Syllabus | Winter 2019

COLI 331T-02 | Television Culture

Lens, Mirror, Screen: George Orwell’s 1984

Binghamton University Department of Comparative Literature

Instructor: Christopher Southward

Or a conjuncture of three moments in the dialectic of television as technical apparatus and cultural practice. In this course, we will read George Orwell’s 1984, view Michael Radford’s filmic adaptation of the novel, and consider a number of critical texts in order to think the psychological and social implications of television as an instrument of control, manipulation, and knowledge production. What, we ask, are the implications, in both 1984 and concrete experience, of light-speed communication capabilities for sense perception, consciousness, language, and awareness? In its dissemination of images and information, how does television impede and/or facilitate politics of identity formation, resistance, and social revolution? How does it inform and/or intersect with rhetorical and aesthetic experience? Or, again, how does it structure time, space, production and consumption? How does it determine practices of producing and consuming goods and services? Alluding to Marshall McLuhan, what, we ask, is the status of subjects, objects, and things in the context of television as ‘medium’ and ‘message’? How does television construct and/or deconstruct memory and history...?

Course Reading Schedule

Week 1

Mon, 12/17:

George Orwell—1984, Part 1

Umberto Eco—Apocalypse Postponed, Pt. 1, Ch. 5: “Orwell, or Concerning Visionary Power”

Jean Baudrillard—“The Ecstasy of Communication”

Barry Brummett—Rhetoric of Machine Aesthetics, Ch. 1: “Aesthetics, Machines, and Rhetoric” (Recommended)

Wed, 12/19:

Paul Virilio—“The Vision Machine”

Marshall McLuhan—“The Medium is the Message”

Louis Althusser—“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (Recommended)

*Paper #1 Topic assigned

Fri, 12/21:

Berel Lang—“1984: Newspeak, Technology, and the Death of Language”

Orwell—1984, Appendix: “The Principles of Newspeak”

*Question/Concept Response #1 due via email by 5pm

Week 2

Mon, 12/24:

*Mon, 12/24/2018—Tues, 01/01/2019: No Readings: Winter Session Break

*Paper #1 due via email by 5pm

Week 3

Wed, 01/02:

Orwell—1984, Part 2

Gilles Deleuze—“Postscript on the Societies of Control”

William Burroughs—“The Limits of Control”

*Paper #2 Topic assigned

Fri, 01/04:

Jean Baudrillard—“The System of Objects”

Walter Benjamin—“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

*Question/Concept Response #2 due via email by 5pm

Week 4

Mon, 01/07:

Orwell—1984, Part 3 and Afterword

Roger Paden—“Surveillance and Torture: Foucault and Orwell on the Methods of Discipline”

*Paper #2 due via Turnitin.com

Wed, 01/09:

Guy Debord—Society of the Spectacle, Chs 1-3

Marita Sturken—“The Politics of Video Memory”

*Paper #3 Topic assigned

Fri, 01/11:

Michael Radford—1984 (Filmic adaptation of Orwell’s 1984)

Debord—Society, Chs. 4-6

*Question/Concept Response #3 due via email by 5pm

Week 5

Mon, 01/14:

Debord—Society, Chs. 7-9

*Paper #3 due via Turnitin.com

*Paper #4 Topic assigned

Tues, 01/15:

Baudrillard—”The Mirror of Production”

*Question/Concept Response #4 due via email by 5pm

Fri, 01/18:

*Paper #4 due via Turnitin.com