Studies of the Superman and Posthuman

As we read about posthumanism and the superman myth, students chose subjects to write about that resonnated with our class discussions in some way. Some used the posthuman/superman myth as a lens for interpreting movies, games, or books. Others took up questions generated by our discussion and sought to create arguments that addressed these issues.

Students in the class ranged from first-year undergraduates to graduate students. The following selected papers are representative of the kind of discussions we had in class. All papers are in .pdf format.

Further Reading

Jessica Chowning, Voldemort: The Wages of Immortality

Samantha Dean, How Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Attempt to Replace the Irreplaceable Soldier: Analysis of the Current and Future Uses of Military Smart Systems

Hetal S. Hariyani, Understanding Superman Myth through Rhetorical Analysis of “Robot,” the Movie

Andrew Herbert, Brain Scratch? Finding the Superman: Science, Souls, and Spirituality

Kyle Hunstein, In Defense of Humanity 2.0: A dialog concerning human augmentation

Jeffrey Knopf, The Future of Human Projection: An Analysis of Domination and Subjection in the Films Surrogates and Gamer

Garion Lovig, The Dilemma of Coexistence

Rebecca Miller, Transhumanist Goals for Immortality

Kyle Ogle, Intelligentia Ex Machina

Jacob Pennington, Trial of Humanity

Alex Shepard, Implementing the Superman by Examining Unusual Collectives

Matthew Sherrill, But what will they think of us? Negative relationships between humans and artificial intelligence in science fiction

Sam Thompson, Overcoming the Rational Mind

Blake Williams, Posthumanism and the Superman in Command & Conquer