The History of Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: the place where our quotidian is manufactured. The Hollywood of the digital, it’s the literal ground upon which new forms of relating, learning, and consuming are invented, tested, codified, packaged, and disseminated until we’ve reconfigured our “natural” and given environment again and again. Silicon Valley is also paradoxically everywhere, dependent on supply chains, laborers, and consumers that are far away. At the same time it’s a milieu of and for a new class structure comprised of the super wealthy (and often very young) that has radically altered the landscape and mores of the Bay Area. While we associate Silicon Valley with the IPO Apocalypse and the gig economy, the region has a much longer history of technological, military, and entertainment industries. Starting in the late 1800s, we will trace the evolution of Silicon Valley and its global flows through to its enormous footprint in/on the present. Along the way, this will require considering the colonization of the American West, built environment and infrastructures, histories of business and technologies, militarization, the status of the university, gender, class and, of course, hacking.

Reading and Writing the Digital

We will survey the production, consumption, and study of literary texts in the digital age. We will explore digital culture in social and networked practices of writing and reading, new theories of reading in the digital moment (distance reading, surface reading), and debates within the digital humanities, media and literary studies, including theorists Best, Chun, Gitelman, Hayles, Liu, Love, and Marcus. Moving from Internet 1.0 to Internet 2.0, we will engage many “born-digital” and online texts, such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon, William Gibson’s Aggripa, Claudio Pinhanez’s “Open Diary” as well as digital literary platforms and websites. We will conclude the semester by looking at digital writing and its reception now, including the Instagram poetry of Rupi Kaur and Warsan Shire’s poetics in Beyoncé’s Lemonade.

Literature of the Self

In this course, we will survey literatures of the self and their history from antiquity to the present. We will attend to the writing of the self in its many genres and forms: the diary, the autobiography, the poem, the novel, the memoir, the case study, the graphic novel, and digital self-presentation. Auto-writings negotiate a paradox: a subjective engagement with subjective fact that often aspires to a nearly scientific objectivity; sometimes they task themselves with the opposite: undoing or revising a scientific or political consensus. We will think about these literatures as means of self-preservation, self-knowing, self-tracking, diagnosis, an accounting for a self, as a site of counter-history, and as a tool for (re)enfranchisement. Authors include Kempe, Pepys, Rousseau, Whitman, Douglass, Freud, Stein, Woolf, Hejinian, Anzaldúa, Bechdel, and Rankine.