| Week |
Subject |
Related Preparation |
| 1) |
Science fiction has been referred to as the last great literature of ideas. It contains imaginative concepts such as parallel universes, fictional worlds full of advanced technology, time travel, extraterrestrial life, and more importantly sociocultural commentary.
We will particularly look at the scientific vision of the authors we will deal with. We will focus more on science than fiction. |
Do an Internet search and check out the web sites about science fiction to find out about the trends from the past to the recent times in the field. |
| 2) |
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is discussed. The discussion topics are the boundaries between life and death, pushing the scientific frontiers, the narrator Robert Walton as an explorer, Victor Frankenstein's development and education as a scientist, advancing of science in the 19th century, the discovery and uses of electricity, the idea of animating dead organisms.
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| 3) |
Aldous Huxley, The Brave New World |
Brave New World is an unsettling, loveless and sinister place. This is because Huxley endows his "ideal" society with features calculated to alienate his audience. Typically, reading BNW elicits the very same disturbing feelings in the reader which the society it depicts has notionally vanquished - not a sense of joyful anticipation. Huxley describes BNW as a "nightmare". Thus BNW isn't intended by its author to, evoke just how wonderful our lives could be if the human genes were intelligently rewritten. In the era of post-genomic medicine, our DNA is likely to be spliced and edited so we can all enjoy life-long bliss. Nor does Huxley's comparatively sympathetic account of the life of the Savage on the Reservation convey just how nasty the old regime of pain, disease and unhappiness can be. |
| 4) |
The Brave New World. Bokanosky process. Bioengineering. Conditioning |
Bioengineering |
| 5) |
Steven Spielberg's A.I. (2001)
If you ask something of Chatgpt, an artificial-intelligence (ai) tool the responses you get back are almost instantaneous, utterly certain and often wrong. The questions raised by technologies like Chatgpt yield much more tentative answers. Experts say the rise of artificial intelligence will make most people better off over the next decade, but many have concerns about how advances in AI will affect what it means to be human, to be productive and to exercise free will. Most experts express concerns about the long-term impact of these new tools on the essential elements of being human. Many people share deep worries. |
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| 6) |
The Matrix asks, “What is real? How do you define real?” The film‘s paranoid fantasy is a brilliant synthesis of computer- simulated world and apocalyptic anxiety. The film combines a film noir style with bleeding-edge FX. But more importantly it raises questions about the digital transformation of the world and its redefining reality. It is argued that advanced civilisation will survive long enough to be able to develop the technology to create various simulated worlds. Physicist, John Wheeler, thinks that the basis of the Universe is not energy or matter, but information, with each subatomic particle representing a bit. “We can basically 3D print any object, and genes are just data.” |
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| 7) |
"Her" (2013) and "Ex-Machina" (2015)
Digital life is augmenting human capacities and disrupting human activities. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world’s inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities and unprecedented threats. As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, how will our status change as humans? The experts predicted networked artificial intelligence will amplify human effectiveness but also threaten human autonomy, agency and capabilities. They spoke of the wide-ranging possibilities; that computers might match or even exceed human intelligence and capabilities on tasks such as complex decision-making, reasoning and learning, sophisticated analytics and pattern recognition, visual acuity, speech recognition and language translation. They said “smart” systems in communities, in vehicles, in buildings and utilities, on farms and in business processes will save time, money and lives and offer opportunities for individuals to enjoy a more-customized future. |
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| 8) |
The Martian (2015), film and the novel.
Some of the biggest names in science and technology have called for the colonization of Mars, including physicist Stephen Hawking and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. They say that populating other planets would help ensure our species' survival should Earth be rendered uninhabitable by some disaster.
"The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions," Musk said last year. "Either we're going to become a multiplanet species and a spacefaring civilization, or we're going to be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event." |
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| 9) |
The Martian continues. Chapters 4 -8. |
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| 10) |
The Martian. Chapters 9 - 12 |
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| 11) |
The Martian. Chapters 13 - 17. |
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| 12) |
The Martian. Chapters 18- 22 |
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| 13) |
The Martian. Chapters 23 - 26. |
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| 14) |
The Martian. Film version is discussed.
Scientists and engineers are rapidly developing the technology needed for interplanetary travel, and humanity does seem all too vulnerable to existential threats. Think runaway climate change, global pandemics, nuclear war. And don't forget about asteroid strikes like the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But the call to put Homo sapiens permanently on Mars seems to sidestep a perverse irony: experts say that a long period of isolation on the red planet — where gravity and sunlight are weaker than on Earth and mutation-causing radiation more intense — could eventually cause the bodies of Mars colonists to change. And at least one expert believes the colonists could evolve into a new species. In other words, becoming a multiplanet species might lead us to become multiple species. |
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Program Outcomes |
Level of Contribution |
| 1) |
To have sufficient knowledge about literary genres, concepts and terms and to be able to use literary, critical, historical and linguistic approaches in text analysis. |
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| 2) |
To be able to understand the phonics, morphological, semantic and etymological properties of English. |
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| 3) |
To provide oral and written presentations about the field and provide the equipment to present. To have a rich vocabulary for this transfer, to have the correct expression and the ability of discourse, and to master the writing rules. |
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| 4) |
To interpret and evaluate literary texts using advanced knowledge and skills in the field, to analyze language, to produce explanations and inferences based on research and evidence. |
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| 5) |
To have a worldview that is aware of and interrogates elements such as language, religion, gender, cultural and sexual identities and differences. |
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| 6) |
Practices the advanced theoretical knowledge of the field in the literary texts and related areas |
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| 7) |
To be able to write texts such as research articles and dissertations by taking advantage of various academic sources. |
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| 8) |
To see how society is shaped every century, to gain models that will be examples of how to adapt to social life and behave according to ethical rules. |
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| 9) |
to possess both the basics of the field and current and advanced practicing knowledges |
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| 10) |
To transmit the sources and works related to the field into Turkish by reading and comprehending them |
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| 11) |
To be able to transfer the knowledge gained by culture and literature, communication skills, critical perspective and flexibility to other areas of life (teaching, guidance, interpreting, international relations, editorial, etc.). |
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| 12) |
To adopt English Literature, culture and history as well as American culture and American Literature with American history. |
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| 13) |
Builds competence in informing and communicating the society on the popular subjects of the field. |
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| 14) |
To be able to follow the theoretical studies by acquiring advanced field knowledge and to communicate with colleagues and to be able to work in projects abroad. |
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| 15) |
To have the necessary language, research and communication skills and a strong general culture to work in the public and private sectors. |
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