Primate Re-Visions (AM, SoSe 2016, Michaela Koch)

“Some apes, it seems, are more equal than others,” remarks astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) in the 1968 film adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel Planet of the Apes (1963). The remark points to one of the key questions in “Primate Re-Visions”: the relationship between human and non-human primates. Over the course of the term, participants will look at a range of (pop) cultural representations of ‘apes’ from Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917) to King Kong (1933), Boulle’s Planet, and from a documentary (The Lost Film of Dian Fossey, 2003) and the feature film Gorillas in the Mist (1999, starring Sigourney Weaver) to Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013).
Please buy and read the following texts:
• Boulle, Pierre. Planet of the Apes. Princeton, NJ: Del Rey, 2001. Print.
• Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2013.
• Kafka, Franz. “A Report to an Academy.” Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Reprint edition. Schocken Books Inc., 1995. Print. (You can also copy the story from the edition in the library!)

The Mediathek will hold copies of most of the movies in a reserve shelf.