Reintegrating Severance

Jennifer Dawes is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Humanities, and Philosophy at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, USA. She has previously published on Dark Tourism in the American West and on western narratives. She teaches classes in film and literature and has included episodes of Severance in her class "Technology and Consciousness in Film and Television."

Nora M. Isacoff holds appointments at both Columbia University and New York University, USA, where she teaches interdisciplinary seminars such as "Consciousness and Cognitive Science" and "Language and Mind." Her research and writing integrate scientific and humanistic approaches to exploring the nature of mind and consciousness. She is the co-author of the book Data and Teaching: Moving beyond Magical Thinking to Effective Practice (Teachers College Press).

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Part I: Constructing History.- Chapter 2: "Who are you?": Memory, History, and Nostalgia on the Severed Floor.- Chapter 3: The Grim Barbarity of Capitalist Designs: Class Conflict, Corporate Dystopia, and the Sacred Gaze in Severance.- Chapter 4: Severed From Reality: The Irrationality of Rationality in Advanced Stage Capitalism.- Part II: Art and Architecture.- Chapter 5: Art as an Apparatus of the Invisible Sublime in Severance.- Chapter 6: Mapping the Subject through Severance's Corporate Architecture and Design.- Chapter 7: Resisting the Innie/Outie Dichotomy Through Mundane Encounters: In Defense of "Spaces of Transition".- Part III: Agency, Autonomy, and Alienation.- Chapter 8: An Investigation of Marxist Alienation in the Post-Modern Workplace in Apple TV's Severance.- Chapter 9: Brain Eugenics: How to Produce an Ideal Worker?.- Chapter 10: "Defiant Jazz": Corporate Rewards as Plantation-Style Oppression in Apple TV's Severance.- Chapter 11: The Waffle Party is Not What It Seems: Sexual, Reproductive, and Labor Exploitation in Severance.- Part IV Multifaceted Bodies and Minds.- Chapter 12: The Aesthetic Virtue of the Severance Procedure: Pledging Spectatorial Allegiance to Both Innies and Outies.- Chapter 13: "Actively Caring For Mankind Since 1866": Nineteenth-Century Medicine, Pain, and the Worker's Body in Season One of Severance.- Chapter 14: "The Mystery of Your Youthful Energy": Time, History, and the Representation of Queer Aging in Severance.- Chapter 15: Self-Communication in Severed Minds: Perspectives from Neuroscience, Psychology, and Philosophy.