ENGLISH (UNIVERSITY)

You will be asked to begin reading about some the various important aspects of this unit.  You will be given an opportunity to reflect on the material and respond to your fellow classmates’ reflection.

This activity will help to build your understanding of the material and to develop your ideas in collaboration with the instructor and your fellow classmates.

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 (632 A.F.—”After Ford”—in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that combine profoundly to change society.

Huxley answered this book with a reassessment in an essay, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with Island (1962), his final novel.

In this unit you will learn about The Tempest a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11, and thought by many critics to be the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone.

It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skilful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island.

There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio’s lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso’s son, Ferdinand.

Media Studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly from its core disciplines of mass communication, communication, communication sciences and communication studies.

Researchers may also develop and employ theories and methods from disciplines including cultural studies, rhetoric (including digital rhetoric), philosophy, literary theory, psychology, political science, political economy, economics, sociology, anthropology, social theory, art history and criticism, film theory, feminist theory, and information theory.

McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” was not restricted to mass media, and for him all human artifacts and technologies are media. A medium is anything that mediates our interaction with the world or other humans. Given this perspective of McLuhan’s media theory is not restricted to just media of communications but all forms of technology. Another insight of McLuhan’s relevant to media theory is that media and their users form an ecosystem and the study of this ecosystem is known as media ecology.