the Prague course, has a meditation on the religious/sacramental body that evolves into a reflection on the anatomical/surgical body and finally to the “human mechanism” that is specific to where we are. The course focuses on the history of a particular place, a region, a set of political concerns. This course will be a critical reflection on the social history of science, on the ways in which the human imagination has responded to ideas about what it is to be human that have emerged from the sciences. The objects of our study will be literary and artistic. Because of our setting here in Prague, this will be a multimedia course, incorporating written texts, visual images, and a number of relevant films (including the work of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer). In the home of real Franz Kafka and the semi-mythical Johann Faust, in the city where the surrealist playwright Karel Čapek coined the “robot,” we will encounter humans saintly, sinful, and synthetic. Animals, too.
