This one's local interest, but anyone in the Triangle who is interested in an "Ecology and the Humanities" working group sponsored by Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute and administered by the Polygraph 22 editors should shoot me an email for details about our first meeting on Nov. 12. We're reading Radkau and Dana Philips the first week.

I realize I never actually put my exam lists on the blog, so now that they're over I thought I might as well. They are far too long and far too diffuse, with some bizarre intensities and many unfortunate omissions and a sometimes questionable relationship to what actually was read—but perhaps something somewhere will catch your eye.

Research Field: "Science Fiction, Modernity, and Empire"

Teaching Field: "American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture After 1898"

Here, too, is SEK on qualifying exams, perhaps the only good thing that has ever been written on the subject.

Now let us never speak of them again.

I'm pleased to announce I'll be co-editing an issue of American Literature next year on science fiction, fantasy, and myth. Here's the CFP; the deadline is May 31, 2010.

American Literature (Duke University Press)
Special Issue on SF, Fantasy, and Myth
http://www.duke.edu/~gc24/americanliterature.html

DEADLINE: 31 May 2010

More than one commentator has mentioned that science fiction as a form is where theological narrative went after Paradise Lost, and this is undoubtedly true…The form is often used as a way of acting out the consequences of a theological doctrine….Extraterrestrials have taken the place of angels, demons, fairies and saints, though it must be said that this last group is now making a comeback.
—Margaret Atwood, “Why We Need Science Fiction”

Fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science fiction is the improbable made possible.
—Rod Serling

In this work I am attempting to create a new mythology for the space age. I feel that the old mythologies are definitely broken down and not adequate at the present time.
—William Burroughs (on the Nova trilogy)

From revolutions in communications technology and transportation to encounters with space travelers and aliens, from leaps in human evolution to new dimensions of existence, from creation stories of the past to speculations about the future, science fiction, fantasy, and myth have variously captured the far reaches of the human imagination, making the familiar strange and the strange inevitable. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is fascinating to watch the rapid innovations in science and technology overtake their fictional anticipation and to return to our most speculative and fantastical literature to see how perceptively it anticipated the social and geopolitical transformations—and challenges—these innovations would inspire. We can, moreover, look through these fictions and recognize in them a prolonged engagement not just with the transient social anxieties of their individual moments, but also with the timeless drama of human contact with the divine, the transcendent, the otherworldly, and the sublime.

This special issue brings together these genres with their divergent but intersecting histories and asks why they might be particularly relevant to study in the contemporary moment. While science fiction has garnered increasing attention in recent years in the academy (and increasing recognition in mainstream publications), the status of fantasy is even more controversial—and the line between them itself a subject of debate. Myth, by contrast, has long been a source of scholarly fascination, although the term typically emerges in the study of American literatures in its pejorative sense. Yet, myth plays a seminal role in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, so much so that science fiction and fantasy can arguably exceed the category of genre to contribute to what William Burroughs calls “a new mythology for the space age.” The issue seeks to move past the definitional debates—beyond, for example, determining the distinction between science fiction and fantasy or the precise definition of myth—to explore broadly the relationship of these genres and modes (individually or in combination) to American literatures and cultures. How, for example, might a focus on science fiction, fantasy, and/or myth change our understanding of literary history? Of literary engagements with scientific and technological innovations as well as with the most pressing political concerns of the moment? How might we use these literary forms to understand genre as a historical repository? The role of mythology in modern culture? What social and geopolitical conditions might produce a genre or mode—or perhaps a critical category that newly classifies certain literary conventions as genres? What themes or questions surface when we read more canonical works through the lens of science fiction, fantasy or myth? Conversely, what happens to these categories when we take seriously, as scholars such as H. Bruce Franklin have done, their early appearance in American literary history? This issue will explore the insights that emerge when we consider the various imaginative engagements that characterize science fiction, fantasy, and myth as central concerns of American literary history and cultural production.

Special issue editors: Priscilla Wald and Gerry Canavan. Submissions of 11,000 words or less (including endnotes) should be submitted electronically at www.editorialmanager.com/al/default.asp by 31 May 2010. When choosing a submission type, select “Special Issue.” Please contact us at 919-684-3948 or am-lit@duke.edu if you need assistance with the submission process. Please direct other questions to Priscilla Wald (pwald@duke.edu) or Gerry Canavan (gerry.canavan@duke.edu).

We've decided to extend the deadline for the Cultures of Recession graduate conference I'm organizing with Ryan, Alex, Lisa, and Sara, to be held at Duke on Nov. 20 & 21. The new and final deadline is September 15; the full CFP can be found here.

The salience of this particular moment fades a bit as we get further and further from Friday's spoiler-line, but I feel compelled to comment briefly on the conversation between Marathe and Steeply that begins on page 638. How can I, or anyone who has chosen a life in academia, read this week's material without feeling interpolated by it? How could any academic, would-be or otherwise, avoid asking him- or herself more than once just what it is that separates us from Steeply's M*A*S*H-obsessed father beyond the razor-thin veneer of professional legitimacy? It's my job, allegedly, to develop intricate and sometimes bizarre readings of pop-culture artifacts, which means it's perfectly okay for me to (still) spend all my time reading science-fiction novels and watching science-fiction movies just like I did when I was twelve. Heck, I wouldn't be doing my work if I didn't! And if I can just trick somebody into paying me to do it I'll never have to stop.

Herman Blume:What's the secret, Max?
Max Fischer: The secret?
Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max Fischer: The secret, I don't know... I guess you've just gotta find something you love to do and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it's going to Rushmore.

Intellectually, of course, I've always been able to recognize the tragic irony of this exchange—Rushmore, you'll remember, doesn't offer a post-graduate year—but I wonder sometimes whether deep down I've ever really come to terms with it.

Is this addiction? Does pursuing a academic career studying literature and pop culture—a preoccupation which over the years has diverted me from any number of more financially lucrative pursuits—mark me as the writerly equivalent of a functional alcoholic? Do I even qualify as functional? And it occurs to me now, reading this section against not only my own life and those of my grad student associates but against the life of anyone who has ever been a "fan" of anything—anyone, that is, who can recognize themselves in the way Steeply's father looked at M*A*S*H—that the danger DFW is highlighting is central to the construction of modern subjectivity. If everything is at least potentially bad for us—even/especially the things that give us pleasure, the things that make life appear to be worth living—just what is it we're supposed to be doing? Where is the authentic, healthy, free life, if there was ever such a thing to begin with? When even the things we love conspire to destroy us, what is left?

As promised, some Sunday links.

* Jon Stewart had odious liar Betsy McCaughey on his show Thursday night, and you should watch it; video at Crooks & Liars. Kevin Drum says Stewart shouldn't have had her on at all; I think the video made McCaughey look terrible and in that sense was an important public service.

* Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

* Mandatory pre-Mad-Men reading: Pandagon's defense of Betty Draper.

* Have we reached Peak Crazy? Fox forces Glenn Beck to take a vacation.

* Responding to Krugman, Glenn Greenwald considers whether Obama has lost the trust of progressives. More on the latest polls showing progressives' loss of faith from Steve Benen, while Matt Yglesias ponders the meaning of GOP approval numbers that "appear to be stuck near some kind of theoretical minimum" and TPM reports Sarah Palin winning the all-important Birther primary.

* Margaret Atwood blogs her book tour.

* Cynical-C has the trailer for Michael Moore's next film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

* Lt. William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, though the MetaFilter thread suggests there may be significantly less here than meets the eye.

"In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour." When the journalist "showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions", Calley left."

* Also at MetaFilter: SIGG admits to misleading the public about its water bottles and BPA.

* Inglourious Basterds as alternate history.

* Game of the night: Max Damage.

* And the Smart Set looks at The Martian Chronicles in the context of 1960s optimism and the New Frontier. My Writing 20 for the spring ("Writing the Future") begins there as well (though with Star Trek instead of Bradbury) before veering off into The Dispossessed and, later, Dollhouse.

Ongoing projects update.

* The Cultures of Recession graduate student conference (Nov. 20 & 21) is still accepting abstracts. We've just received word that the Duke Center for International Studies will be providing travel support for visiting grad students, which is very exciting.

* Polygraph 22: "Ecology & Ideology" is rapidly moving into the editorial phase. About half our articles are in and the other half will be in by the end of the Fall semester. Look for a great interview between Kim Stanley Robinson and the three editors in this space as the publication date draws closer...

* Fantasy soccer starts in two weeks. Don't miss out; email me or comment for the league codes.

Kind of got our number there.

Today's the second day of class, which is again why blogging has been so slow this week. (After the weekend I'll hopefully have built up enough of a lead on my prep that I can go back to wasting time on the Internet as usual.) The planned schedule for the course is here, for those interested; big thanks to Isaac, Alex, Jacob, Ryan, everyone at the Yale Superheroes in Film conference, and everyone else who gave me tips on how to put it all together. So far, I must confess, it's a pretty good time.

Two more posters for my "Comics as Literature" summer course in Duke's Term 1 this summer, which I've recently found out that UNC student can take for UNC tuition. Tell everyone.

LIT 151S Comics as Literature. Beginning with Batman and Superman, passing through R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Maus, and moving into the contemporary era of Persepolis and Dykes to Watch Out For, this course will survey the history and reception of graphic narrative as the genre moves from a predominantly American, predominantly male fixation on the superhero towards an increasingly popular international art movement that crosses gender, class and ethnic lines. Likely texts will include Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, Frank Miller’s Batman, Stan Lee’s Iron Man, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, as well as selected excerpts and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

American Stranger has a new post about the tyranny of writing on the Internet. It goes a long way towards explaining the way I blog, actually:

Writing on the Internet immediately threatens ‘authors’ with their ‘audience’ — the moment one stops thinking of oneself as an isolated performer on stage is when conversation can begin, but doing this requires the abandonment of all concern for developing one’s ‘craft.’

My "writing" is what I do in published articles, stories, and papers—aside from a couple of experiments with culturemonkey, I've never been able to think of my blogging as writing. It's an entirely different, and for me significantly inferior, practice; a hobby, not a vocation.

Earlier today I gave my talk at the Southwest/Texas PCA/ACA conference, "Red Mars, Green Earth: Science Fiction and Ecological Futurity." Like the last paper I gave, these are ideas I'll be returning to in some form or another soon, but I can give you a short rundown of the argument now. (I think that these ideas may be somewhat unsurprising to anyone who has talked to me about this sort of thing before.)

1) Science fiction should be understood as an ecological literature. I recognize people might not recognize this claim immediately, as most people are familiar with SF through cultural productions like Star Wars. So I star with Star Wars, particularly a short clip of the Coruscant chase sequence from Attack of the Clones. I talk about the weightless, groundless quality of Lucas's idea of the city that has grown so large that it encompasses the entire planetary mass, and compare that to Asimov's Trantor.

Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor. . . .

Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millennium of the Empire, the monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial policy became little more than the protection of Trantor’s delicate jugular vein. . . .

Trantor, unlike the green-screened Coruscant, is a material place, populated by living bodies with living needs. Trantor has an ecology; Coruscant does not. I go on about this for a little while.

2) I use the distinction between Coruscant and Trantor to draw a line between science fiction (SF) and science fantasy, using Darko Suvin's definition.

SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.

I try to establish that the boundary condition for SF is going to require precisely this sort of ecological thinking—to be SF rather than a (mere) fantasy you need to establish a plausible environmental network through which alternative modes of existence can be conceived. SF without ecology lapses into fairy tale and thereby (in Suvin’s words) “commits creative suicide.” (So watch out for that, George Lucas.)

3) I then try to argue that the how the current environmental crisis demands not just this sort of methodological ecology but a politically environmentalist consciousness, and trace the politics of this back to Frankenstein with a lot of attention paid to the early H.G. Wells.

4) To wrap up I do a little bit of taxonomy, comparing the apocalypse (Wall-E) to the dystopia of continuation (The Sheep Look Up) to the utopia (Kim Stanley Robinson). This last bit, not surprisingly, is where I get the title from...

Beg, borrow, lie, cheat, steal, whatever you have to do to get the money to take my course on comics in Duke's Term 1 this summer. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, 5-7 PM.

LIT 151S Comics as Literature. Beginning with Batman and Superman, passing through R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, and Maus, and moving into the contemporary era of Persepolis and Dykes to Watch Out For, this course will survey the history and reception of graphic narrative as the genre moves from a predominantly American, predominantly male fixation on the superhero towards an increasingly popular international art movement that crosses gender, class and ethnic lines. Likely texts will include Siegel and Shuster’s Superman, Frank Miller’s Batman, Stan Lee’s Iron Man, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang, Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha and Alan Moore’s Watchmen, as well as selected excerpts and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

Successfully made it up to New Haven in time for my talk today. Aside from some technical snafus—my PowerPoint doesn't seem to want to play embedded movies at an audible volume—I think it went over reasonably well. The conference's title is "The Politics of Superheroes: Renegotiating the Super-Hero in Post 9/11 Cinema" and my talk was called "Person of the Year: Barack Obama, The Joker, Capitalism, and Schizophrenia." Essentially I try to make a few types of claims:

1) That although from a structural perspective he is obviously staged as the villain, in terms of The Dark Knight's narrative energy the Joker is unquestionably its central figure and creative engine, even (from a certain perspective) its hero;

2) that the film foregrounds the extent to which Batman (as a kind of stand-in for capitalism) and the Joker (creative destruction) need each other, that neither one can exist without the other;

3) that the Joker is therefore best understood not as a "terrorist" but as a kind of Deleuzean force of pure code-scrambling that (again despite the narrative framing) speaks to a revolutionary creative force ("schizophrenia") that is both capitalism's enemy and its limit;

4) that there exist certain theoretical similarities between the Joker and 2008's most important buzzword, CHANGE;

5) that taking all of the above to heart to the extent that Obama becomes a champion of continuity rather than change we supporters must be prepared to be the Joker to his Batman.

That's pretty reductive of a twenty-plus-minute presentation, but something close to the point.

I really enjoyed writing this one, but I'm really not sure where it goes from here. It doesn't seem exactly publishable; it's located very much in this particular moment right at the cusp of Obama's presidency—if it were to appear in an anthology or even a journal it would need to take a rather different and much more historical perspective on all this. I don't know. I'll think it over.

Science fiction authors that lit geeks think it's cool to read. Surprisingly complete list from io9—off the top of my head it's hard to think of any omissions besides J.G. Ballard and perhaps Kim Stanley Robinson.

You could play the same game in the opposite direction, too: traditionally literary authors that sci-fi geeks think it's cool to read. Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, Kafka, DeLillo, Pynchon, DFW...

Andrew Sullivan on blogs as a new golden age of writing.

The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more. And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.

But the superficiality masked considerable depth—greater depth, from one perspective, than the traditional media could offer. The reason was a single technological innovation: the hyperlink. An old-school columnist can write 800 brilliant words analyzing or commenting on, say, a new think-tank report or scientific survey. But in reading it on paper, you have to take the columnist’s presentation of the material on faith, or be convinced by a brief quotation (which can always be misleading out of context). Online, a hyperlink to the original source transforms the experience. Yes, a few sentences of bloggy spin may not be as satisfying as a full column, but the ability to read the primary material instantly—in as careful or shallow a fashion as you choose—can add much greater context than anything on paper. Even a blogger’s chosen pull quote, unlike a columnist’s, can be effortlessly checked against the original. Now this innovation, pre-dating blogs but popularized by them, is increasingly central to mainstream journalism.

A blog, therefore, bobs on the surface of the ocean but has its anchorage in waters deeper than those print media is technologically able to exploit. It disempowers the writer to that extent, of course. The blogger can get away with less and afford fewer pretensions of authority. He is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.