Last week saw the start of a new semester at ASU and the start of a new course I’m teaching, Media Literacies and Composition. It’s my first chance to teach our Digital Culture students and I’m excited to meet such a diverse group: musicians, film-makers, designers and artists. Oh, and a few writers to keep me company.
We’ll be looking at the ideas of close reading, composition and narrative in across a number of media old and new. And, since this is a digital culture course, the students will be making a lot of cool stuff as we go along. I’m looking forward to seeing it!
First Principles
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Newly released: American Dreamers, a collection of “dreams from optimists, inventors and mavericks with ideas for a brighter future.” My essay (online here) leads off the book with a look at the combustible, illuminating nature of good ideas and the unique optimism of the American Dream. It’s also a pretty good declaration of principles for what we are trying to accomplish at the Center for Science and the Imagination.
Hello again!
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After a few years of slumming it with free hosting I’ve ponied up for an actual (shared) server. Welcome to the new and improved* blog.
*Novelty and improvements forthcoming. Potentially.
What is Science Fiction Good For?
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An excellent question that I attempt to answer in my debut post as a blogger for the Huffington Post:
The New Yorker just released its first special issue devoted to science fiction, including contributions from genre giants like Ursula K. Le Guin and Ray Bradbury as well as rising “literary fiction” stars like Junot Díaz and Karen Russell. As writers at Wiredand io9 have noted, the issue marks a new level of mainstream interest in science fiction, giving a whole cadre of New-Yorker-obsessed “serious readers” license to take genre fiction, well, seriously. But what about science fiction in universities? In her contribution to the new issue, Ursula K. Le Guin argues that in the past “quite a few science-fiction writers accepted exile from the Republic of Letters to the ghetto of genre, perhaps because ghettos, like all gated communities, give the illusion of safety.” In fact, science fiction has been sneaking into all sorts of new neighborhoods. The U.K.-based New Scientist has launched Arc, “a new magazine about the future,” while the venerable MITTechnology Review released a special issue of science fiction featuring Cory Doctorow, Joe Haldeman, and others. Ridley Scott’s television series Prophets of Science Fiction explores the power of fiction to both advance and complicate our ideas about the future, and Stephen Hawking is hosting the Science Channel’s Stephen Hawking’s Sci-Fi Masters.
The Legacy of David Foster Wallace
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Last week saw the arrival of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, a wonderful collection of essays by Wallace critics, friends and colleagues. My piece in the collection, “Becoming Yourself: David Foster Wallace and the Afterlife of Reception,” considered Wallace’s legacy through his communities of readership on Amazon and I feel very lucky to be in such august company. For example, my essay is nestled between Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen!
Here’s the full list of contributors:
Samuel Cohen (co-editor) Don DeLillo Dave Eggers Ed Finn Kathleen Fitzpatrick Jonathan Franzen Paul Giles Heather Houser Lee Konstantinou (co-editor) David Lipsky Rick Moody Ira B. Nadel Michael Pietsch Josh Roiland George Saunders Molly Schwartzburg
Thanks very much to Lee and Sam for including me!
An Interview with Scott Z. Burns
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I had a chance to interview Scott Z. Burns, screenwriter for Contagion, The Bourne Ultimatum and The Informant (not to mention producer for An Inconvenient Truth) for Slate last week. We talked about his deft ability to smuggle real science into Hollywood movies, the difference between Contagion and Outbreak, and his new comedy about mirror neurons.
Getting Past Dystopian SF
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Another post up on Slate last week:
What should we expect from science fiction? In a recent Smithsonian article by IO9’s Annalee Newitz, author Neal Stephenson criticized the dystopian cynicism that currently pervades the genre. Instead he calls a more optimistic, realistic approach—fewer zombies and man’s folly-style catastrophes, more creative inventions and solutions. In the spirit of being constructive, he’s also taking action. The first step is an anthology of optimistic, near-term science fiction, forthcoming from William Morrow in 2014, that will tackle this challenge head-on. Smithsonian describes the project, Hieroglyph, as a plan “to rally writers to infuse science fiction with the kind of optimism that could inspire a new generation to, as he puts it, ‘get big stuff done.’”
Digital Humanities Roundtable
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I’m very excited to be participating in today’s Digital Humanities Roundtable at the Institute for Humanities Research. If you’d like to follow along with my talk (or explore some more of my data and slides) you can do so below.
Contemporary Digital Humanities on Prezi
Presentation for Arts, Media and Engineering
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I’m delighted to be presenting some of my recent work for the School of Arts, Media and Engineering today. Please
A Field Guide to Literary Networks on Prezi
Revenge of the Nerd
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Here are the slides for my upcoming talk, “Revenge of the Nerd: Junot Díaz and American Literary Networks.” If the embedded code below doesn’t work for you, try this link.
