This course examines how writers have represented the computer as a cultural artifact. The course will briefly survey the history of the computer, but we will take literary representations of the computer as an opportunity for learning how to read and write about fiction. Thus, the novels and short stories examined in this course will invite us to ask two seemingly unrelated questions: “What is fiction?” and “What is the computer?” These questions seem to have straightforward answers, but students will come to think in new and critical ways about both fiction and the computer as social technologies.
