Index#: 03728
Will Count Towards German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures MAJOR
Will Count Towards German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures MINOR
The natural sciences and the humanities have always shared an interest in how we experience, use, and change our bodily abilities. A body part of astonishing and at times inexplicable qualities remains the hand.
Already Aristotle called the hand the “organ above organs” while Quintilian claimed that it formed a “universal language.” Hands speak to us as much as they speak of us!
In this class, we will examine how and why the hand plays an exceptional role in establishing and maintaining the human condition. The hand is as manifold as no other part of the human body: it allows to touch and feel things; its ability to grasp and form objects marks the evolutionary beginning of humankind as much as the upright gait does; and it is an instrument to write, paint, and fulfill many other difficult tasks. Our trajectory will lead us from hand prints in ancient caves to the Hand of God, from the invention of sign language in the Renaissance to the discovery of the fingerprint in criminal investigation, from the masterful hand of Leonardo to robotic hands in medical surgery, and from hands gone awry in romantic tales to the laborious hands of workers at the assembly line. These hardworking hands that push buttons, leave traces, and create artworks will allow us to ask the following questions:
How are humans different from animals?
If hands can speak, can they also think?
What is the difference between left and right?
Will Artificial Intelligence finally supersede the grasp of the human hand?
About Professor Karl
My research draws from a range of disciplines and centers on media ecology, psychoanalysis, as well as the entanglement of aesthetics and politics. Focusing on twentieth-century German and French literature and film, media studies is my comprehensive framework for understanding the interplay and impact of different forms of art on society at large.
My current book project, titled Manipulations. The Hand as Symbol and Symptom in the Arts and Literature after 1900, extends that impulse towards a transmedial scholarship. Based on a sweeping emergence of hands in German and French literature, photography, and film after the turn of the twentieth century, this project reassesses the relationship between handwork and technology, between technological reproducibility and the hand as corporeal instrument and figure of thought.
I share a strong passion for contemporary German-speaking theater and collaborated as a dramaturg in various performances in Germany and the US.