You are cordially invited to this semester’s first instalment of the Humanities Faculty Seminar Series. This will be a hybrid event.
Speaker: Dr Kara McCormack (Bilkent, AMER)
Date: Wednesday 22 March 2023
Time: 17:30 – 18:30
Place: G-160 (humanities building)
Or on Zoom:
Topic: AMER – ELIT / Seminer – “Home. Family. Future: Authenticity, the Frontier Myth, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” / Dr Kara McCormack
Time: Mar 22, 2023 05:30 PM Istanbul
This is an online event. To obtain event details please send a message to the department.
Title: Home. Family. Future: Authenticity, the Frontier Myth, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Abstract: This talk explores the ways Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) utilizes the meanings of the American frontier and wilderness to get at questions of authenticity and renewal. The film’s narrative is told from the perspective of nonhuman protagonists to allow for a reflection on humanity and those institutions grounded in traditional, conservative values: masculinity, family, and the natural world. By placing audience empathy squarely with the nonhuman primates – presented as the more authentic beings the imagined wilderness represents – the film is able to more clearly critique the human exploitation and greed that led to social catastrophe in the first place. The symbolic appeal of the frontier is ever present, with its promise of a translation of the self and society into something purer and more real.
Biographical note: Dr. McCormack is a cultural studies scholar with a primary focus on the ways the themes and significance of the mythic American West emerge in and intersect with science fiction. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico; her first monograph, Imagining Tombstone: The Town too Tough to Die, was published in 2016.