The precision and resolution of contemporary descriptions of living systems - perhaps best exemplified by the sequencing technologies that render DNA for its unique "fingerprint" - would seem to have evacuated all ambiguity from our knowledges of "life." Life appears not as the impossible object of a science which it will always elude, but as a set of phenomena that can be characterized according to a sequence of nucleotides and their interactions with an ecology, the instantiation of a genetic program. In short, we in the late 21st century finally know what life is.

And yet if this technoscientific resolution is persuasive at the level of very specific scientific statements - "Biology has demonstrated that there is no metaphysical entity hidden behind the word "life"" - life's character as a scientific concept, a political entity.
and as an object of narrative has become perhaps more uncertain than ever. Are artificial life organisms.
- sequences of software that evolve - alive? Is the earth, as researchers Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have argued, itself a living organism? If humans are informatic entities, in what sense are they anything other than machines? This course will analyze the rhetorical formations that form the history of questions such as these, looking to discourses as varied as 18th century biology and late 20th century science fiction.

Books:
Blood Music Greg Bear
Dawn Octavia E. Butler
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality Karen Newman
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
The Double Helix : A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA James D. Watson
The Origin of Species Charles Darwin

Video:
"The Book of Life"
"The Fly" (To see reponses to "The Fly", click here)

Software:
Simlife (To see responses to Simlife, click here)

Websites:
Jane ROE, et al., Appellants, v. Henry WADE.
The Visible Human
The Gaia Hypothesis

Syllabus