“Thinking with Magic Media: The Transformative Powers of Fantastic Imagination from 3,000 BC to 2019”

    Teaching

    Description

    (Part of Erasmus exchange and Erasmus teaching). We use media to understand ourselves, our society, and to imagine our future. This seminar explores how magic, media, and the fantastic imagination interact in producing ideas, images, fantasies, and stories about the future. It explores the fantastic as a unique human cognitive ability to wonder and imagine, to think, stage, design, and narrate alternate – un–real, im–possible, non–existent – worlds. Not long ago, the fantastic and science was linked in our thinking. Today, we find the fantastic and magic in entertainment media. The discussed texts include film, tv,and media with cuneiform from Mesopotamia, and medieval grimoires. The lecture uses cognitive theory of fiction, religion, and magic (Boyd 2009, Boyer 2001, Koch 2018, Czachesz 2007).
    Period24/04/201924/04/2019
    Target groupBachelor