Surveillance and Society: Big Brother, Secret Police, and Reality TV

Catalog description

A study of surveillance in fiction, history, and the contemporary world. Surveillance begins with the erosion of the bourgeois idea of a right to privacy, reaches an extreme in totalitarian states, and resurfaces in the contemporary age of 24-hour digital monitoring and self-display. We will explore the technological, political, social, and aesthetic dimensions of surveillance. Materials to be examined include dystopian novels, philosophical texts, films that employ and depict surveillance, and historical and legal documents from the German, French and American contexts.