Finding the Poetry in the Desert of the Real
You’ve got to love that Slavoj Žižek. I developed a fondness for his inspired/crazed lacanian readings of popular culture when I put together a course on the Matrix trilogy a couple of summers ago. So...
View ArticleReading on the Rise
The National Endowment for the Arts has announced a reversal in the decades-long downward trend of American reading habits. The last time they published a major study on reading the hue and cry was...
View ArticleGenre Fiction & The Relentless Undead
One of the interesting questions at play in my dissertation is the way treat genre writers differently from “real” writers. Authors like Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy straddle the...
View ArticleAuthor Soundtrack
I feel like the soundtrack has changed recently around here from the mellow tunes of summer so something more purposeful, something with an actual beat. This is good news for the dissertation project,...
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Gender Bias in Reviews
I was fascinated to read an analysis Slate‘s DoubleX staff ran yesterday about gender bias in New York Times book reviews. They discovered that there is a significant slant towards men getting reviewed...
View ArticleFranzen on Oprah
As a follow-up to my last post I was planning to talk a little more about the images I posted there. But before I get to that, I need to digest the latest wrinkle in this canon conflict–Franzen’s...
View ArticleCulturomics: Not Quite Yet
Well, it’s time to stick my oar in on the Google Ngrams discussion. While a number of computational linguistics scholars have pointed out the pitfalls of Google’s latest toy, I think I have a unique...
View ArticleScience Fiction as the Conscience of Science
My review of Ridley Scott’s Prophets of Science Fiction ran on Slate’s Future Tense channel today! Here’s a teaser: Science fiction’s reputation for appealing to the nerdy and anti-social has long...
View ArticleWhat is Science Fiction Good For?
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...
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