How has the human condition been redefined throughout history from Plato and Aristotle through Ovid and Shakespeare to Michel de Montaigne, Mary Shelley, Franz Kafka, and science fiction?

As AI tools provoke rethinking of creativity and the human condition, it is all the more important to examine what it entails to be human, to construct the social spaces of humanity, and how we envision the relationships between human and nonhuman entities such as the machine, environment, animals, and objects.

This course examines how imaginative literature bears witness to the limits of the human, how literature depicts otherness through human and non-human entities such as monsters, machines, animals, and fungible objects, and why virtuality triggers anxiety.