Jay Clayton received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before coming to Vanderbilt, he taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. At Vanderbilt, he teaches courses in contemporary American literature; genetics in literature, film, and media; Victorian fiction; hypermedia and online gaming; and literary theory.
His current research involves the ethical and social issues raised by genetics as they appear in literature and films. He has lectured on genetics and literature at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH, the English Institute, the MLA, the Narrative Society, Society for Literature and Science, and medical schools around the country. Address: Department of English Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37212
A 2-minute teaser for my article in Medical Humanities on Samuel J. Delany's classic SF story, "T... more A 2-minute teaser for my article in Medical Humanities on Samuel J. Delany's classic SF story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Delany imagines something he calls “hologramic information storage,” which allows an interplanetary Special Service agent to discover everything a suspect has done or will be doing at any time in the past, present, or future. Delany’s vision perfectly captures the time signature of genomics, the illusion that data encoded in your DNA can reveal your entire life—not only where you came from but what you will become—from a single test in the present. Like “queer time,” to which I compare genomics, Delany’s story ends by finding queer ways of inhabiting time and space despite everything that would seem to foreclose possibilities.
This article analyzes the complete corpus of live-action X-Men movies for their depictions of gen... more This article analyzes the complete corpus of live-action X-Men movies for their depictions of genetics and otherness. The researchers watched and qualitatively coded all thirteen movies produced by 20th Century Fox that take place in the same shared cinematic universe, beginning with X-Men (2000) and ending with The New Mutants (2020). The X-Men movies are unusual summer blockbusters since they explore genetic topics through their central characters, mutants, who are genetically different from their non-mutant peers. Mutants in the films evoke a plurality of analogies, such as mutant-as-Black and mutant-as-queer. These intersecting metaphors build upon a core of genetic difference to create a versatile but limited picture of prejudice, solidarity, and otherness.
American television medical dramas have thrived as a genre since the early 1950s. Unlike other po... more American television medical dramas have thrived as a genre since the early 1950s. Unlike other popular media representations of genetics, medical dramas serve as one of the strongest positive on-screen advocates for advances in genetic research and medicine. We reviewed 5,217 episodes from 65 medical dramas, running from 1961 to present, and located 151 episodes with substantial genetic content. Our study finds that (1) doctor shows can act as a timeline that reflects genetic advances, as well as societal hopes, fears, and attitudes about genetics, and (2) that they offer insight into family relationships and the ways both genetics and social factors are balanced in modern family structures. Genetic plotlines have gone from being largely tangential to the characters and themes in medical dramas to directly affecting the main characters and their families. This change stemmed initially from the shift away from paternalism in medical dramas, and later, from the rise in narratives that blur the doctor/patient boundary. The mix of medical exploration and emotional weight make the medical drama a unique and revealing format for depicting relevant modern issues surrounding genetics.
The acclaimed Canadian television series Orphan Black (2013-2017) poses a question straight out o... more The acclaimed Canadian television series Orphan Black (2013-2017) poses a question straight out of the pages of science fiction: What would it be like to encounter multiple versions of yourself in the form of clones that you never knew you had? Reared in completely different environments, each clone develops a unique personality, astonishingly portrayed by the actress Tatiana Maslany, who performs twelve different roles (often several in the same scene) over the course of the show's five seasons. From a scientific point of view, the clones' differentiation into distinct identities is the most accurate aspect of the show's premise. But equally plausible in social terms are the bonds that begin to develop among the beleaguered figures, who are initially being hunted down by one of their own and later learn that they are under constant surveillance by an unethical corporation that is using them as experimental research subjects. As the show progresses, the network of relations they forge, facetiously christened the "Clone Club"-ends up offering viewers an alternative vision of kinship and sociality. The show's reconceptualization of the nuclear family, as it has been traditionally conceived in Western society, evokes phenomena that are already becoming common in today's world-both the "families of choice" described by Kath Weston in her book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1991) and the genetic kin who are brought together via ancestry web sites, genetic testing services, and social media networks of donor-siblings described by Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson in Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin (2018). This article explores the relationship between the alternative kinship networks in Orphan Black and these two real-world phenomena, concentrating on the privacy issues emerging almost weekly in news and other media accounts of individuals discovering new-often unexpected-kin. Orphan Black is unprecedented in setting both of these alternative family structures in dialogue with one another. The importance of LGBTQIA+ families is foregrounded by the prominence of queer sexuality in the show itself. The series features a range of same-gender sexual relationships, prominent in several storylines, as well as surrogate, adoptive, and voluntary families that cross national, linguistic, educational, generational, class, and lifestyle boundaries. As Hamner puts it, "Orphan Black treats all of its clones as figuratively queer." Consequently, the show's queer allegiances transgress more than heterosexual norms. The phenomenon of "genetic families" who bond over their newly discovered genetic relationship, is dramatized with equal prominence in the show. Together, these alternative family structures create novel social arrangements that challenge normative assumptions in multiple domains.
The articles in this double special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science address the to... more The articles in this double special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science address the topic of genetic privacy in literature, film, and TV, from the early decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement was just becoming aware of genetics, to the twenty-first century, when clones, chimeras, and gene-editing are as common at the multiplex as in the laboratory. Genetic privacy is a matter of increasing concern in today's society. High profile events such as the capture of the Golden State Killer have dramatized how publicly accessible genetic information can be used by law enforcement to track suspects. Some commentators worry that genetic information could lead to discrimination in health insurance or employment; stigmatize people with genetic conditions; reinforce ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender bias; lead to new forms of eugenics; or be used by governments to infringe on individual and collective rights. The eight articles about genetic privacy in this issue are the fruits of a unique collaboration.
This article examines Richard Matheson’s iconic horror novel I am Legend (1954) and its three mai... more This article examines Richard Matheson’s iconic horror novel I am Legend (1954) and its three main cinematic adaptations in order to pinpoint several shifts in the cultural response to biological threats: (1) To mark one sign of the emergence of genetics as a threat in the cultural imaginary; (2) to chart the movement of this threat from viral infection, spread by others, to the unintended consequences of genetic engineering; (3) to register the movement from external threats involving Othered groups to the internal threat of tampering with our own genes; and (4) to address how racist and ableist discourses in popular media forms like horror films may use a veneer of science to legitimate oppression toward populations that have suffered civil death or have been reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”
Advances in genetic science have long been a focus of popular media such as film and television. ... more Advances in genetic science have long been a focus of popular media such as film and television. Research has demonstrated that audiences of such media combine popular narratives with their own experiences in order to make sense of complex topics, but relatively little is understood about the way in which genetic science appears across time and a broad range of media. In order to better understand the presentation of genetic science in film and television, this study built a unique dataset of over 700 film and television items that contain prominent genetic content. Our findings indicate that formal elements including genre and medium (i.e., film vs. television) as well as the period of production influence the ways in which genetics is presented on screen. These findings provide useful insights for scientists and policymakers interested in facilitating productive communication of science to the public.
Available free online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. As part of JVC’s ongoing com... more Available free online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. As part of JVC’s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 . From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and visitors alike.
The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers... more The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers that included two of the foremost geneticists of the time, J. B. S Haldane and Julian Huxley; the novelist who gave the world the most influential vision of a genetic future, Aldous Huxley; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook rivals Brave New World in its prophecies about the social transformations that genetics might unleash. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the modern world, with its dispassionate, impartial, and unsparing satire of all aspects of life, is closer to the scientific point of view of Haldane and other modern geneticists than to Huxley’s literary modernist peers. The failure to understand Huxley’s satiric vision has led to egregious misreadings of Brave New World to support attacks on twenty-first century genetics and has distorted public policy recommendations by influential conservative voices.
This article explores the temporal implications of genomics through the lens of a classic science... more This article explores the temporal implications of genomics through the lens of a classic science fiction story by Samuel R Delany, ‘Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones’. Delany’s futuristic vision of ‘hologramic information storage’, which allows the interplanetary Special Services to discover and predict everything a suspect has done or will be doing at any time in the past, present or future resembles ‘genome time’, the illusion that data encoded in your DNA can reveal your entire life—not only where you came from but what you will become—and that it is knowable from a single test in the present. The temporal implications of genomics are compared with ‘queer time’ and contrasted with the temporal implications of nanoscience and climate change in order to clarify what is distinctive about genome time. In conclusion, some practical consequences of genome time are discussed.
The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early ... more The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age" of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: Clarke's Childhood's End, Sturgeon's More Than Human, Van Vogt's Slan, Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and Methuselah's Children, and a number of lesser known texts. The second phase got under way in the late-1970s and lasted up until just before the millennium. Stimulated by excitement over recombinant DNA and the first test-tube baby in 1978, the surge of interest in genetic transformations of the human explored genetic engineering rather than evolution as the source of the posthuman. The fiction considered includes Octavia Butler's The Xenogenesis Trilogy, Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and its sequel, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. The article concludes with a look at a third group of books, nonfiction about the posthuman by bioethicists and policy experts published since 2002. I characterize this last body of work as either variants of the American jeremiad Sacvan Bercovitch described or as "anticipations" in the optative mode of popular science writing pioneered by H. G. Wells in his book by that name, Anticipations (1901). Throughout the article, I emphasize the covert relationship between nonfiction policy works—for and against genetic enhancement—to what Istvan Cscicsery-Ronay called "science-fictional habits of mind . . .a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction."
This article presents three moments in history—the late-nineteenth century, the early twentieth, ... more This article presents three moments in history—the late-nineteenth century, the early twentieth, and our own time—to delineate three patterns of literary response to disorienting changes in temporal scale prompted by Darwinism, its modern synthesis with genetics, and “genome time” today. As exemplified by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), twenty-first century depictions of evolutionary time envision a dual temporality in which the personal rhythm of daily life and the impersonal time scale of the species achieve paradoxical synthesis. Such a notion of temporality was scarcely imaginable to most earlier writers, even those committed to Darwinism or neo-Lamarckism.
This history of Victorian literature’s role in twentieth- and twenty-first century popular cultur... more This history of Victorian literature’s role in twentieth- and twenty-first century popular culture and academic discourse culminates with a discussion of three ways that steampunk and neo-Victorian fiction differ from postmodernism.
This article explores the changing attitudes toward genetic privacy in three texts that have had ... more This article explores the changing attitudes toward genetic privacy in three texts that have had enormous influence on the treatment of genetics in science fiction—Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Each generation’s blade runner narrative reveals a distinctive perspective on genetics, drawing on cultural references and scientific knowledge specific to its own time. As one of the more recent entries into the “blade runner canon,” Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 reflects some of our present-day fears and anxieties. In response to the concurrent rise of biotechnology and authoritarianism, the film depicts a world in which protections of genetic privacy have collapsed in the face of a two-directional assault from biotech corporations and an oppressive state. Blade Runner 2049’s narrative and mise-en-scène alert us to concerns about genetic privacy latent in both earlier works. Taken together, these three blade runner narratives suggest that, as the loss of genetic privacy becomes accepted and normalized, it opens the door to other privacy rights infringements, warning us of the danger of forfeiting individual autonomy to government and corporate entities.
This paper investigates sound reproduction technologies before the advent of recordings. Using D... more This paper investigates sound reproduction technologies before the advent of recordings. Using Dickens’s Christmas tale The Chimes, I discuss bells alongside barrel organs, clock chimes, factory whistles, theatrical sound effects, telegraphs, and other acoustic devices as ways to re-produce, in the sense of repeating, sound. Prior to recording technology, this kind of reproduction was the only way in which remembered sounds could be heard again. Every performance of the sound was a singular event, even if the auditory experience evoked all the sensory effects, emotional resonances, and public meanings of its previous iterations. The capacity of an oft-heard bell to evoke both personal associations and civic meanings—holidays, religious occasions, deaths, anniversaries—anticipates the distinction between emotion and affect proposed by recent affect theorists. If, as a number of theorists have proposed, emotion requires a subject and affect does not, then Dickens’s account of the power of sound to shatter the subject—in the person of poor Toby Veck—takes the analysis a step further. In the process, Dickens’s story captures the way a physiological state can be deeply social and collective in character and can motivate a politics of reform. For it is not the sentimental feelings or the satire of the heartless rich that most effectively communicate Dickens’s social message but the affect that sound-reproducing technology produces in the body of both the individual and the community.
Free online: http://asapjournal.com/. The six articles in this cluster focus on how the arts inf... more Free online: http://asapjournal.com/. The six articles in this cluster focus on how the arts influence public attitudes toward genetics in the age of big data. The articles analyze the most comprehensive database ever assembled of films and television shows about genetics (800+ unique items, dating from 1912-2020, coded for 109 attributes). In addition, the cluster introduces the kind of “vertical integration” common in the lab sciences to literary studies by involving humanities undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in all aspects of the research process, including collaborative authorship. Genetic privacy has a bearing on important social and political questions, including bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, queer sexualities, surrogate decision making, kinship and ancestry, parentage, and more.
This article uses the examples of H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Thomas H. Huxley to ... more This article uses the examples of H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Thomas H. Huxley to propose that the humanities should play a larger role in shaping science policy in the twenty-first century. It briefly explains the policy making process in the United States and suggests ways that humanists can use their methodologies and insights to affect social change.
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, 2015
This article analyzes the portrayal of artificial intelligence in cinema, charting the shift from... more This article analyzes the portrayal of artificial intelligence in cinema, charting the shift from massive central processing units to distributed information networks in the web.
The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in realist fiction about science. Contempora... more The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in realist fiction about science. Contemporary storylines focus on a wide variety of disciplines: genetics, information technology, ecology, physics, astronomy, pharmacology, neuroscience, robotics, nanotechnology, and other fields. Our chapter provides an overview of this development, surveying fiction by Richard Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Crichton, Gary Shteyngart, Vandana Singh, and others. We argue that different fields of science prompt different types of questions about the relationship between science and society. Care for the specificity of disciplines—their particular protocols and concerns—signals a cultural revaluing of the importance of science for society, as does the success of many novels in making science personal and aesthetically pleasurable. Drawing attention to the socio-economic, educational, and cultural aspects of science not only reveals science’s imbrication in society, but also marks a shift in science’s place in Western culture.
A 2-minute teaser for my article in Medical Humanities on Samuel J. Delany's classic SF story, "T... more A 2-minute teaser for my article in Medical Humanities on Samuel J. Delany's classic SF story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Delany imagines something he calls “hologramic information storage,” which allows an interplanetary Special Service agent to discover everything a suspect has done or will be doing at any time in the past, present, or future. Delany’s vision perfectly captures the time signature of genomics, the illusion that data encoded in your DNA can reveal your entire life—not only where you came from but what you will become—from a single test in the present. Like “queer time,” to which I compare genomics, Delany’s story ends by finding queer ways of inhabiting time and space despite everything that would seem to foreclose possibilities.
This article analyzes the complete corpus of live-action X-Men movies for their depictions of gen... more This article analyzes the complete corpus of live-action X-Men movies for their depictions of genetics and otherness. The researchers watched and qualitatively coded all thirteen movies produced by 20th Century Fox that take place in the same shared cinematic universe, beginning with X-Men (2000) and ending with The New Mutants (2020). The X-Men movies are unusual summer blockbusters since they explore genetic topics through their central characters, mutants, who are genetically different from their non-mutant peers. Mutants in the films evoke a plurality of analogies, such as mutant-as-Black and mutant-as-queer. These intersecting metaphors build upon a core of genetic difference to create a versatile but limited picture of prejudice, solidarity, and otherness.
American television medical dramas have thrived as a genre since the early 1950s. Unlike other po... more American television medical dramas have thrived as a genre since the early 1950s. Unlike other popular media representations of genetics, medical dramas serve as one of the strongest positive on-screen advocates for advances in genetic research and medicine. We reviewed 5,217 episodes from 65 medical dramas, running from 1961 to present, and located 151 episodes with substantial genetic content. Our study finds that (1) doctor shows can act as a timeline that reflects genetic advances, as well as societal hopes, fears, and attitudes about genetics, and (2) that they offer insight into family relationships and the ways both genetics and social factors are balanced in modern family structures. Genetic plotlines have gone from being largely tangential to the characters and themes in medical dramas to directly affecting the main characters and their families. This change stemmed initially from the shift away from paternalism in medical dramas, and later, from the rise in narratives that blur the doctor/patient boundary. The mix of medical exploration and emotional weight make the medical drama a unique and revealing format for depicting relevant modern issues surrounding genetics.
The acclaimed Canadian television series Orphan Black (2013-2017) poses a question straight out o... more The acclaimed Canadian television series Orphan Black (2013-2017) poses a question straight out of the pages of science fiction: What would it be like to encounter multiple versions of yourself in the form of clones that you never knew you had? Reared in completely different environments, each clone develops a unique personality, astonishingly portrayed by the actress Tatiana Maslany, who performs twelve different roles (often several in the same scene) over the course of the show's five seasons. From a scientific point of view, the clones' differentiation into distinct identities is the most accurate aspect of the show's premise. But equally plausible in social terms are the bonds that begin to develop among the beleaguered figures, who are initially being hunted down by one of their own and later learn that they are under constant surveillance by an unethical corporation that is using them as experimental research subjects. As the show progresses, the network of relations they forge, facetiously christened the "Clone Club"-ends up offering viewers an alternative vision of kinship and sociality. The show's reconceptualization of the nuclear family, as it has been traditionally conceived in Western society, evokes phenomena that are already becoming common in today's world-both the "families of choice" described by Kath Weston in her book Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1991) and the genetic kin who are brought together via ancestry web sites, genetic testing services, and social media networks of donor-siblings described by Rosanna Hertz and Margaret K. Nelson in Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin (2018). This article explores the relationship between the alternative kinship networks in Orphan Black and these two real-world phenomena, concentrating on the privacy issues emerging almost weekly in news and other media accounts of individuals discovering new-often unexpected-kin. Orphan Black is unprecedented in setting both of these alternative family structures in dialogue with one another. The importance of LGBTQIA+ families is foregrounded by the prominence of queer sexuality in the show itself. The series features a range of same-gender sexual relationships, prominent in several storylines, as well as surrogate, adoptive, and voluntary families that cross national, linguistic, educational, generational, class, and lifestyle boundaries. As Hamner puts it, "Orphan Black treats all of its clones as figuratively queer." Consequently, the show's queer allegiances transgress more than heterosexual norms. The phenomenon of "genetic families" who bond over their newly discovered genetic relationship, is dramatized with equal prominence in the show. Together, these alternative family structures create novel social arrangements that challenge normative assumptions in multiple domains.
The articles in this double special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science address the to... more The articles in this double special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science address the topic of genetic privacy in literature, film, and TV, from the early decades of the twentieth century, when the eugenics movement was just becoming aware of genetics, to the twenty-first century, when clones, chimeras, and gene-editing are as common at the multiplex as in the laboratory. Genetic privacy is a matter of increasing concern in today's society. High profile events such as the capture of the Golden State Killer have dramatized how publicly accessible genetic information can be used by law enforcement to track suspects. Some commentators worry that genetic information could lead to discrimination in health insurance or employment; stigmatize people with genetic conditions; reinforce ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender bias; lead to new forms of eugenics; or be used by governments to infringe on individual and collective rights. The eight articles about genetic privacy in this issue are the fruits of a unique collaboration.
This article examines Richard Matheson’s iconic horror novel I am Legend (1954) and its three mai... more This article examines Richard Matheson’s iconic horror novel I am Legend (1954) and its three main cinematic adaptations in order to pinpoint several shifts in the cultural response to biological threats: (1) To mark one sign of the emergence of genetics as a threat in the cultural imaginary; (2) to chart the movement of this threat from viral infection, spread by others, to the unintended consequences of genetic engineering; (3) to register the movement from external threats involving Othered groups to the internal threat of tampering with our own genes; and (4) to address how racist and ableist discourses in popular media forms like horror films may use a veneer of science to legitimate oppression toward populations that have suffered civil death or have been reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”
Advances in genetic science have long been a focus of popular media such as film and television. ... more Advances in genetic science have long been a focus of popular media such as film and television. Research has demonstrated that audiences of such media combine popular narratives with their own experiences in order to make sense of complex topics, but relatively little is understood about the way in which genetic science appears across time and a broad range of media. In order to better understand the presentation of genetic science in film and television, this study built a unique dataset of over 700 film and television items that contain prominent genetic content. Our findings indicate that formal elements including genre and medium (i.e., film vs. television) as well as the period of production influence the ways in which genetics is presented on screen. These findings provide useful insights for scientists and policymakers interested in facilitating productive communication of science to the public.
Available free online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. As part of JVC’s ongoing com... more Available free online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. As part of JVC’s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 . From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and visitors alike.
The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers... more The modern synthesis begins in Bloomsbury with a group of novelists, scientists, and philosophers that included two of the foremost geneticists of the time, J. B. S Haldane and Julian Huxley; the novelist who gave the world the most influential vision of a genetic future, Aldous Huxley; and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose The Scientific Outlook rivals Brave New World in its prophecies about the social transformations that genetics might unleash. Aldous Huxley’s vision of the modern world, with its dispassionate, impartial, and unsparing satire of all aspects of life, is closer to the scientific point of view of Haldane and other modern geneticists than to Huxley’s literary modernist peers. The failure to understand Huxley’s satiric vision has led to egregious misreadings of Brave New World to support attacks on twenty-first century genetics and has distorted public policy recommendations by influential conservative voices.
This article explores the temporal implications of genomics through the lens of a classic science... more This article explores the temporal implications of genomics through the lens of a classic science fiction story by Samuel R Delany, ‘Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones’. Delany’s futuristic vision of ‘hologramic information storage’, which allows the interplanetary Special Services to discover and predict everything a suspect has done or will be doing at any time in the past, present or future resembles ‘genome time’, the illusion that data encoded in your DNA can reveal your entire life—not only where you came from but what you will become—and that it is knowable from a single test in the present. The temporal implications of genomics are compared with ‘queer time’ and contrasted with the temporal implications of nanoscience and climate change in order to clarify what is distinctive about genome time. In conclusion, some practical consequences of genome time are discussed.
The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early ... more The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age" of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: Clarke's Childhood's End, Sturgeon's More Than Human, Van Vogt's Slan, Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon and Methuselah's Children, and a number of lesser known texts. The second phase got under way in the late-1970s and lasted up until just before the millennium. Stimulated by excitement over recombinant DNA and the first test-tube baby in 1978, the surge of interest in genetic transformations of the human explored genetic engineering rather than evolution as the source of the posthuman. The fiction considered includes Octavia Butler's The Xenogenesis Trilogy, Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and its sequel, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. The article concludes with a look at a third group of books, nonfiction about the posthuman by bioethicists and policy experts published since 2002. I characterize this last body of work as either variants of the American jeremiad Sacvan Bercovitch described or as "anticipations" in the optative mode of popular science writing pioneered by H. G. Wells in his book by that name, Anticipations (1901). Throughout the article, I emphasize the covert relationship between nonfiction policy works—for and against genetic enhancement—to what Istvan Cscicsery-Ronay called "science-fictional habits of mind . . .a mode of response that frames and tests experiences as if they were aspects of a work of science fiction."
This article presents three moments in history—the late-nineteenth century, the early twentieth, ... more This article presents three moments in history—the late-nineteenth century, the early twentieth, and our own time—to delineate three patterns of literary response to disorienting changes in temporal scale prompted by Darwinism, its modern synthesis with genetics, and “genome time” today. As exemplified by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), twenty-first century depictions of evolutionary time envision a dual temporality in which the personal rhythm of daily life and the impersonal time scale of the species achieve paradoxical synthesis. Such a notion of temporality was scarcely imaginable to most earlier writers, even those committed to Darwinism or neo-Lamarckism.
This history of Victorian literature’s role in twentieth- and twenty-first century popular cultur... more This history of Victorian literature’s role in twentieth- and twenty-first century popular culture and academic discourse culminates with a discussion of three ways that steampunk and neo-Victorian fiction differ from postmodernism.
This article explores the changing attitudes toward genetic privacy in three texts that have had ... more This article explores the changing attitudes toward genetic privacy in three texts that have had enormous influence on the treatment of genetics in science fiction—Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Each generation’s blade runner narrative reveals a distinctive perspective on genetics, drawing on cultural references and scientific knowledge specific to its own time. As one of the more recent entries into the “blade runner canon,” Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 reflects some of our present-day fears and anxieties. In response to the concurrent rise of biotechnology and authoritarianism, the film depicts a world in which protections of genetic privacy have collapsed in the face of a two-directional assault from biotech corporations and an oppressive state. Blade Runner 2049’s narrative and mise-en-scène alert us to concerns about genetic privacy latent in both earlier works. Taken together, these three blade runner narratives suggest that, as the loss of genetic privacy becomes accepted and normalized, it opens the door to other privacy rights infringements, warning us of the danger of forfeiting individual autonomy to government and corporate entities.
This paper investigates sound reproduction technologies before the advent of recordings. Using D... more This paper investigates sound reproduction technologies before the advent of recordings. Using Dickens’s Christmas tale The Chimes, I discuss bells alongside barrel organs, clock chimes, factory whistles, theatrical sound effects, telegraphs, and other acoustic devices as ways to re-produce, in the sense of repeating, sound. Prior to recording technology, this kind of reproduction was the only way in which remembered sounds could be heard again. Every performance of the sound was a singular event, even if the auditory experience evoked all the sensory effects, emotional resonances, and public meanings of its previous iterations. The capacity of an oft-heard bell to evoke both personal associations and civic meanings—holidays, religious occasions, deaths, anniversaries—anticipates the distinction between emotion and affect proposed by recent affect theorists. If, as a number of theorists have proposed, emotion requires a subject and affect does not, then Dickens’s account of the power of sound to shatter the subject—in the person of poor Toby Veck—takes the analysis a step further. In the process, Dickens’s story captures the way a physiological state can be deeply social and collective in character and can motivate a politics of reform. For it is not the sentimental feelings or the satire of the heartless rich that most effectively communicate Dickens’s social message but the affect that sound-reproducing technology produces in the body of both the individual and the community.
Free online: http://asapjournal.com/. The six articles in this cluster focus on how the arts inf... more Free online: http://asapjournal.com/. The six articles in this cluster focus on how the arts influence public attitudes toward genetics in the age of big data. The articles analyze the most comprehensive database ever assembled of films and television shows about genetics (800+ unique items, dating from 1912-2020, coded for 109 attributes). In addition, the cluster introduces the kind of “vertical integration” common in the lab sciences to literary studies by involving humanities undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in all aspects of the research process, including collaborative authorship. Genetic privacy has a bearing on important social and political questions, including bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, queer sexualities, surrogate decision making, kinship and ancestry, parentage, and more.
This article uses the examples of H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Thomas H. Huxley to ... more This article uses the examples of H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and Thomas H. Huxley to propose that the humanities should play a larger role in shaping science policy in the twenty-first century. It briefly explains the policy making process in the United States and suggests ways that humanists can use their methodologies and insights to affect social change.
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, 2015
This article analyzes the portrayal of artificial intelligence in cinema, charting the shift from... more This article analyzes the portrayal of artificial intelligence in cinema, charting the shift from massive central processing units to distributed information networks in the web.
The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in realist fiction about science. Contempora... more The last three decades have seen a dramatic increase in realist fiction about science. Contemporary storylines focus on a wide variety of disciplines: genetics, information technology, ecology, physics, astronomy, pharmacology, neuroscience, robotics, nanotechnology, and other fields. Our chapter provides an overview of this development, surveying fiction by Richard Powers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Crichton, Gary Shteyngart, Vandana Singh, and others. We argue that different fields of science prompt different types of questions about the relationship between science and society. Care for the specificity of disciplines—their particular protocols and concerns—signals a cultural revaluing of the importance of science for society, as does the success of many novels in making science personal and aesthetically pleasurable. Drawing attention to the socio-economic, educational, and cultural aspects of science not only reveals science’s imbrication in society, but also marks a shift in science’s place in Western culture.
Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 17, Issue 4 pp. 518-523, Dec 15, 2012
Available free online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. As part of JVC’s ongoing com... more Available free online at http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. As part of JVC’s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 .
From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and visitors alike.
Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence public policy concerning scientific controversies in genetics and other areas. Literature brings unique insights to issues involving cloning, GMOs, gene editing, and more by dramatizing their full human complexity. Literature's value for public policy is demonstrated by striking examples that range from the literary response to evolution in the Victorian era through the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics in the mid-twentieth century to present-day genomics. Outlining practical steps for humanists who want to help shape public policy, this book offers vivid readings of novels by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gary Shteyngart, and others that illustrate the important insights that literary studies can bring to debates about science and society.
Jacket description:
Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of litera... more Jacket description:
Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Hélène Cixous, Alfonso Cuarón, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.
Contents
Part I
Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, "Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence... more Contents
Part I
Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, "Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality"
Part II
Jay Clayton, "The Alphabet of Suffering: Effie Deans, Tess Durbeyfield, Martha Ray, and Hetty Sorrel"
Tilottam Rajan, "Intertextuality and the Subject of Reading / Writing"
A. N. Doane, "Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English"
Eric Rothstein, "Diversity and Change in Literary Histories"
Part III
Susan Stanford Friedman, "Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author"
Thomas Schaub, "Allusion and Intertext: History in The End of the Road"
Cyrena N. Pondrom, "Influence? or Intertextuality?: The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell with Gertrude Stein"
Lynn Keller, "'For inferior who is free?': Liberating the Woman Writer in Marianne Moore's 'Marriage'"
Andrew D. Weiner, "Sidney/Spenser/Shakespeare: Influence/Intertextuality/Intention"
Jeffrey Steele, "The Call of Eurydice: Mourning and Intertextuality in Margaret Fuller's Writing"
William L. Andrews, "Inter(racial)textuality in Nineteenth-Century Southern Narrative"
Betsy Draine, "Chronotope and Intertext: The Case of Jean Rhys's Quartet"
This course focuses on British and transatlantic writing during two moments in which both genre d... more This course focuses on British and transatlantic writing during two moments in which both genre distinctions and disciplinary boundaries between science and literature were being recast in decisive ways—one in the decades just prior to the Victorian age, when science and technology were very much a part of the larger culture, not a separate sphere reserved for specialists; the other at the fin de siècle, when " racial science, " eugenics, and imperialism were closely intertwined. In each period, we will read foundational works of scientific culture alongside British and American popular fiction, which powerfully shaped public attitudes toward science and society. We will also read some neo-Victorian fiction from the late-twentieth century to explore how alternative history can revise our understanding of the past.
Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and experienced gamers who want to ... more Intended for both newcomers who are curious about video games and experienced gamers who want to reflect on their passion, this course will explore what happens to stories, paintings, and films when they become the basis of massively multiplayer online games. The Lord of the Rings trilogy—the novels, films, and video game—are our central example of how “remediation” transforms familiar stories as they move across media.
The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.
Since the heyday of the science wars in the 1990s when radical critiques of science provoked a ba... more Since the heyday of the science wars in the 1990s when radical critiques of science provoked a backlash in the scientific community, a shift has occurred in the relationship between science, medicine, and the humanities. New models range from cognitive studies and evolutionary psychology, which tend to emphasize what science can contribute to the humanities, to models that emphasize the way literary studies can affect scientific and medical practice by influencing public policy. In the latter case, focusing on the social, ethical, and cultural implications of science gives literary scholars an opportunity to intervene in established interdisciplinary conversations that have real consequences beyond the academy.
In this seminar we will concentrate on dystopian fictions and films such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazua Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005), and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), as well as other recent novels such as Ian McEwan;s Saturday (2005) and Richard Powers’s Generosity (2009); science fiction stories by Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, and Greg Egan; and theoretical texts in science studies by Lorraine Daston, Lennard Davis, Peter Galison, Sander Gilman, John Guillory, Evelyn Fox Keller, Nikolas Rose, Steven Shapin, Priscilla Wald, and Lisa Zunshine.
To provide hands-on experience in interdisciplinary research methods, students will join research teams in a medical school laboratory with the goal of identifying a literary work that explores the social or cultural implications of the lab’s investigations in areas such as breast feeding, cancer research, contagious diseases, vaccine safety, genetic screening, cloning, organ transplants, pain, and sexuality research. Students will learn how grants are developed in the sciences; how multi-disciplinary teamwork occurs in the medical world; and how to generate papers on social, ethical, and cultural issues raised by science and medicine.
This class will explore the relationship between science and science fiction. Drawing on classic... more This class will explore the relationship between science and science fiction. Drawing on classic works of scientific writing and SF, we will examine the distinctive modes of imagination and style in the two activities, as well as their social and cultural influences. What are the ground rules for introducing original ideas in each field? How are ideas embedded and developed in a SF story in comparison with their presentation in a scientific article? What roles do prediction and falsification play in each? Fiction will range from the origins of the genre in Wells to the “golden age” of Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and Bradbury to new wave fiction, speculative fiction, Afro-futurism, and emerging twenty-first century writers, and will include readings from exemplary works of science writing. No scientific background is required, but scientific concepts will be introduced and discussed.
Computer games are transforming the entertainment industry, generating an estimated $57 billion i... more Computer games are transforming the entertainment industry, generating an estimated $57 billion in revenue in 2009. For more than twenty years, online communities have been producing new forms of psychological, social, and cultural experience. Early text-based adventure games such as Zork have become the multimedia environments of online games like Lord of the Rings Online, which combine the written word with graphics, music, skills, professions, and action. Are online games generating new interactive modes of narrative? How do multimedia environments transform the age-old patterns of quest romances that structure much game play? Is the line between virtual and real experience erased by the fusion of online communities, role playing, and escapist fictions? These questions will animate our consideration of digital narrative forms.
Taught by a professor of English, the course will meet in a multimedia seminar room in the Hill Center, allowing us to explore the fundamentals of game design. Students will be required to subscribe to an online game, Lord of the Rings Online, and will compare the interactive story arcs with related narrative forms from literature and film. Readings will range from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring to H. G. Well’s The Time Machine to steampunk fiction, comics, anime, and action film and include critical theory such as Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory. Students must have a Windows based computer or Bootcamp already installed on their Mac computers before the first day of class.
Includes descriptive metadata provided by producer in MP3 file: "CFT Podcasting - Podcas... more Includes descriptive metadata provided by producer in MP3 file: "CFT Podcasting - Podcast Episodes - Episode 7 - Teaching in a Digital Age - In this episode, we're changing up our format a little. Instead of featuring an interview with a single faculty member, this episode features audio ...
Book review of Daniel A. Novak's Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge ... more Book review of Daniel A. Novak's Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge UP, 2008)
... In the books by McCaffery, Caramello, Pearce, Thiher, and O'Donnell not a sin-gle mi... more ... In the books by McCaffery, Caramello, Pearce, Thiher, and O'Donnell not a sin-gle minority writer is discussed, and only one woman, Flannery O'Connor, receives any critical attention (in O'Donnell). ... JAY CLAYTON, Vanderbilt University 223
..Irony and ethics in narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan. Author: Handwerk, Gary J. (b. 1954, d. -... more ..Irony and ethics in narrative: From Schlegel to Lacan. Author: Handwerk, Gary J. (b. 1954, d. ----.
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From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and visitors alike.
Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence public policy concerning scientific controversies in genetics and other areas. Literature brings unique insights to issues involving cloning, GMOs, gene editing, and more by dramatizing their full human complexity. Literature's value for public policy is demonstrated by striking examples that range from the literary response to evolution in the Victorian era through the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics in the mid-twentieth century to present-day genomics. Outlining practical steps for humanists who want to help shape public policy, this book offers vivid readings of novels by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gary Shteyngart, and others that illustrate the important insights that literary studies can bring to debates about science and society.
Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Hélène Cixous, Alfonso Cuarón, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.
Preface: Driving through Babel
Culture/Narrative/Power
The Story of Deconstruction
Theories of Desire
The Narrative Turn in Minority Writing
Rituals of Change: Ethnography on the Border
Feminism and the Politics of Community
Conclusion: Literature without Masterpieces
Part I
Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, "Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality"
Part II
Jay Clayton, "The Alphabet of Suffering: Effie Deans, Tess Durbeyfield, Martha Ray, and Hetty Sorrel"
Tilottam Rajan, "Intertextuality and the Subject of Reading / Writing"
A. N. Doane, "Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English"
Eric Rothstein, "Diversity and Change in Literary Histories"
Part III
Susan Stanford Friedman, "Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author"
Thomas Schaub, "Allusion and Intertext: History in The End of the Road"
Cyrena N. Pondrom, "Influence? or Intertextuality?: The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell with Gertrude Stein"
Lynn Keller, "'For inferior who is free?': Liberating the Woman Writer in Marianne Moore's 'Marriage'"
Andrew D. Weiner, "Sidney/Spenser/Shakespeare: Influence/Intertextuality/Intention"
Jeffrey Steele, "The Call of Eurydice: Mourning and Intertextuality in Margaret Fuller's Writing"
William L. Andrews, "Inter(racial)textuality in Nineteenth-Century Southern Narrative"
Betsy Draine, "Chronotope and Intertext: The Case of Jean Rhys's Quartet"
The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.
In this seminar we will concentrate on dystopian fictions and films such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazua Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005), and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), as well as other recent novels such as Ian McEwan;s Saturday (2005) and Richard Powers’s Generosity (2009); science fiction stories by Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, and Greg Egan; and theoretical texts in science studies by Lorraine Daston, Lennard Davis, Peter Galison, Sander Gilman, John Guillory, Evelyn Fox Keller, Nikolas Rose, Steven Shapin, Priscilla Wald, and Lisa Zunshine.
To provide hands-on experience in interdisciplinary research methods, students will join research teams in a medical school laboratory with the goal of identifying a literary work that explores the social or cultural implications of the lab’s investigations in areas such as breast feeding, cancer research, contagious diseases, vaccine safety, genetic screening, cloning, organ transplants, pain, and sexuality research. Students will learn how grants are developed in the sciences; how multi-disciplinary teamwork occurs in the medical world; and how to generate papers on social, ethical, and cultural issues raised by science and medicine.
Taught by a professor of English, the course will meet in a multimedia seminar room in the Hill Center, allowing us to explore the fundamentals of game design. Students will be required to subscribe to an online game, Lord of the Rings Online, and will compare the interactive story arcs with related narrative forms from literature and film. Readings will range from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring to H. G. Well’s The Time Machine to steampunk fiction, comics, anime, and action film and include critical theory such as Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory. Students must have a Windows based computer or Bootcamp already installed on their Mac computers before the first day of class.