First Paper: Museum Trip (3-4 pp).

        This paper requires you to make a trip into Philadelphia to visit a museum. Obvious choices would be the Philadelphia Museum of Art or The Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. Upon arrival, you should sample as quickly as possible the variety of the museum's collections. The paper requires that you choose two items that you particularly liked, describe them, and explain the reasons for your choice. You should make some reference to the ways in which the items distinguished themselves (for you) from other items displayed in the same room. (We shall discuss in class what might constitute an "item.")

        The paper should take the form of a narrative: your journey from Villanova to Philadelphia, your expectations (which may depend upon your familiarity with cities and museums), and your journey home (which will, presumably, be somewhat different, given your experiences of the museum and of the city). The paper invites some narrative shaping, which may require some imaginative reworking. Thus your paper will not read merely as a chronological narrative ("first I did this, and then that, and then that, and then came back to campus") but as an essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

        Students are encouraged to travel in groups if they so desire (but they should write about different artifacts and rooms). Too much time should not be devoted to mere incidentals (getting up, getting lost, eating lunch etc) although these may be used for dramatic effect.

        You may want to visit the Museum's web-site first so that you have a notion of what you may want to concentrate upon. Public transport into Philadelphia is excellent, but you should check train schedules as well as museum opening hours. We can discuss other possible venues in class.

Second Paper: Fight Club, Blade Runner, and Descartes (3-4 pp).

        In this paper you should compare the films (and the novels upon which they were based) in the context of the philosophy of Descartes: mind and body, body and soul, animal and human, artificial intelligence.

Fight Club may precipitate so immediate (indeed, visceral) an experience for the cinema-goer that Cartesian problems may seem very far away indeed. But both novel and film dramatize the central proposition of Cartesian philosophy-cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am-and its ramifications, namely the complex relationships between mind and body. Mortality threatens our consciousness: if I can no longer think-because I am dead-where am I? Are mind and soul synonymous and how do they relate to our physical embodiment as sentient beings? Where do I go when my body is dead? What about the immortality of the soul?

        Both novel and film begin with a gun in the mouth of the speaker, an imminent threat to the cogito. Both dramatize dying bodies (in twelve step groups, in the death of Bob, in Marla's assertion of a death-wish, and in the aforementioned gun) but both highlight other Cartesian issues: how can we tell when we are awake or asleep, how can we tell whether we are being deceived by an "evil demon," what is the relationship of mind to sexuality? Does the mind (res cogitans) control the body (res extensa)-as Descartes maintained-or is the mind merely "brain matter," another physical, mortal organ?

        There is a social as well as a psychological perspective. Descartes believed in scientific progress, but Palahniuk opts for a darker view, closer to that of Jonathan Swift (who dismissed progress as an illusion). All the benefits of modern technology that Fight Club parades-cars, planes, skyscrapers, well-paying jobs, credit cards, even IKEA-are seen in both novel and film as destructive of our vital relationship with the body (which can be reasserted by bare-knuckle boxing, even by making soap.) Hence men have to get in touch with themselves in the most brutal way possible. Where, you may ask, does this leave women? How adequately does Marla represent women? (You may want to think for the future how Swift's attitude to the body differs from the novel and the movie of Fight Club.)

        You should consider that novel and movie end differently. In my opinion, the movie is the greater achievement of the two (sharper, wittier, better edited) but the conclusion arguably remains more sentimental and unrealistic than that of the novel (it presents romantic togetherness-with some postmodern riffs-instead of a murderer's solitude in the madhouse). You may want to consider why the film is so popular with young males in today's society if they aspire to enter the materialistic world satirized by Palanhiuk and Fincher?

        Neither Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (DADES) nor Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (BR) focus on individual people in the same way as Fight Club. Rick Deckard (=Rene Descartes?) is not so immediately attractive, even heroic, as Tyler Durden. Dick makes Deckard a dweeby bureaucrat with marital problems; Scott makes him a divorced burned-out case who shoots women (robotic women, to be sure) in the back.

        Fight Club is a highly original novel, but Dick is working, quite consciously, within the traditions of the noir crime novel (of the West Coast) and of the dystopia (compare 1984 or Brave New World). Yet Dick also works, more explicitly than Fight Club, within the context of the Cartesian cogito. If intelligence can be simulated by robots ("androids" in the novel, "replicants" in the movie), what defines human as human? (The ambition of the Tyrell Corporation in both novel and movie is to turn out products that are "more human than human.")

        Is it intelligence (dependent upon the cogito) that makes you and me human or is it, perhaps, our feelings? If Deckard and Rachel can, in the movie, share feelings for each other, has she become human? Can computers/robots become like us? Is Deckard a replicant? Are we? (In the novel, however, Rachel remains a machine-not thoughtless but without feeling.) Robots have a built-in mutability, but both novel and film ask if the same isn't true of us; perhaps humans don't have an immutable soul? (Descartes changed his mind on the role of feelings in the definition of "the human," but most commentators still highlight his own earlier focus upon the cogito).

        Descartes thought that animals were machines because they lacked a cogito; they were merely res extensa like our bodies or like puppets or mechanical toys. Descartes refused to see humans as (partly) animal and forced an absolute distinction between res cogitans (our minds) and res extensa (all other stuff). These are among the Cartesian topics explored in both novel and film. Unlike Dick, Scott (brilliantly) emphasizes atmosphere at the expense of philosophical coherence. But he too raises a host of Cartesian problems. A dancing android declares: "I think, therefore I am." Does this make her human?

        Both DADES and BR discuss war, ecology, animal experiments, and other issues that all revolve around the philosophy of Descartes. Like Fight Club, both pose urgent questions about the impact of science, technology, and progress upon the "modern" world.

        In your paper, you should choose some comparable themes from Fight Club, DADES, BR, and Descartes' philosophy and analyze their interconnectedness.