UC Santa Cruz is one of the cooler universities in America. Being a research university, it offers ample opportunity for science majors and similar majors to get some hands-on experience. And guess what? The humanities have no been forgotten either. The university offers a research grant to undergraduate students who are majoring in something within the humanities division: I’m a literature major.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I figure a little fanfare was in order to make UCSC sound even cooler to those of you who don’t know much about it or are perhaps considering it for your own studies.
Having spent the summer thinking about what to do, I’ve finally come up with what I think is a really interesting idea:
I’m going to discuss how science fiction film and television works towards denying the existence of a human category. What I mean is that films/shows like Battlestar Galactica, Space Above and Beyond, Starship Troopers, Bicentennial Man, etc. actually challenge the notion that there is such a thing as a “human” outside of a biological context. Ultimately I’m aiming to discuss what “human” actually means, how science fiction challenges it, and how the human/inhuman dichotomy is a glorious contradiction and, in particular to the second part of that dichotomy, hypocritical.
Yeah, pretty intense, eh? I might include actual literature sources and intend to do some research at a large film collection to find more obscure works. So, what do you think?
