Jay Murray Siskind is Don DeLillo's only recurring character, having first appeared in DeLillo's pseudonymous Amazons and later as a kind of Mephistopheles character in White Noise. Now, Siskind has broken out of the realm of fiction and entered the real world. I am referring to "An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent," a… Continue reading David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, and the Littlest Literary Hoax
Author: Mark Sample
Michael Jackson and Cultural Relevance
Amid the 24-hour barrage of "news" about Michael Jackson's death last week, I tweeted, a bit tongue-in-cheek, this question: Is anybody besides me willing to argue that The A-Team was more culturally significant in the eighties than Michael Jackson? My friend Adam wondered whether I and other skeptics were minimizing Jackson's cultural impact, especially when… Continue reading Michael Jackson and Cultural Relevance
Reading List for ENGL 459: Disaster Fiction (Fall 2009)
Here's the official reading list for ENGL 459 on Disaster Fiction, along with a quick breakdown of the class's organization: Part I: The Disaster Novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle Part II: The Postmodern Disaster Novel White Noise by Don DeLillo Part III: Apocalyptic Journeys Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler… Continue reading Reading List for ENGL 459: Disaster Fiction (Fall 2009)
Amazon.com ending Amazon Associates Program for North Carolina
Amazon.com sent me a message this morning, announcing that the company is has "little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates" because of an "unconstitutional tax collection scheme" due to be passed by the North Carolina General Assembly. Not that I make any significant amount of money from my referrals to Amazon,… Continue reading Amazon.com ending Amazon Associates Program for North Carolina
Reading List for ENGL 493: Graphic Novels (Fall 2009)
I've finalized the reading list for my Fall 2009 course on graphic novels. This is the same super-sized class that I'll be teaching with technologies that may help me preserve my student-centered pedagogy. The syllabus was especially hard to settle on, as there are so many compelling graphic novels worthy of inclusion. I had to… Continue reading Reading List for ENGL 493: Graphic Novels (Fall 2009)
30 Days of Night, Again, and Again, and Again
One midnight a short time ago I picked up 30 Days of Night, a vampire graphic novel I was looking forward to, after having read some great reviews. (In 500 Essential Graphic Novels, for example, Gene Kannenberg calls 30 Days of Night a “livid, modern-gothic triumph.”) I finished the first volume by 1am. Was I… Continue reading 30 Days of Night, Again, and Again, and Again
Where Have All the Princesses Gone?
Ian Bogost has a theory about Every Computer Animated Film Ever that boils down every plot into a universal structure, not too dissimilar from the monomythic Hero's Journey. I don't have much to add about the narrative conventions of the genre, other than to seize upon one point Bogost makes in passing and to expand… Continue reading Where Have All the Princesses Gone?
Teaching Technologies for Large Classes
Faced with the prospect of teaching larger classes, I've been thinking about how technology might help me preserve what I value most about small class sizes—and perhaps even bring added value to those large classes. But first some background. There's probably not a humanities program in the country that hasn't received a memo from its… Continue reading Teaching Technologies for Large Classes
Facebook versus Twitter
Facebook is the past, Twitter is the future. Or phrased less starkly, Facebook reconnects while Twitter connects. All of my friends on Facebook are exactly that: friends from real life, or at the very least, people whom I actually know. Colleagues, students, family members, former classmates, childhood friends. A significant chunk of those Facebook friends… Continue reading Facebook versus Twitter
Television Emulation for the Atari VCS
This is absolutely stunning: Ian Bogost had his computer science students at George Tech modify Stella, the opensource Atari 2600 emulator, to reproduce the same kind of visual artifacts you would've seen when you played the VCS on a CRT television (those big boxy TVs with tubes, for those of you who don't remember). Their… Continue reading Television Emulation for the Atari VCS
Zen Scavenger Essay Writing
Lately I've been wondering how to use Jane McGonigal's Zen Scavenger Hunt idea in my teaching. A Zen Scavenger Hunt is essentially a reversed-engineered scavenger hunt. The hunters go out and find ten or or so items and only afterward do they receive the list of the items they're supposed to be scavenging for. The… Continue reading Zen Scavenger Essay Writing
Electronic Literature Course Description
A few of my English department colleagues and myself are preparing to propose a new Electronic Literature course, to replace a more vaguely named "Textual Media" class in the university course catalog. Here is an incredibly first draft version of the course description, building in part on language from the Electronic Literature Organization's own description… Continue reading Electronic Literature Course Description
The Digital Humanities and Literary Scholarship
Here's the skeleton of a presentation I gave for our ENGL 701 grad students. This is a research methods class and I offered an overview of the ways that technology can either enhance or downright transform literary scholarship. Engl 701 (Spring 2009)View more presentations from samplereality.
Fall 2009 Course Descriptions
I've got two fantastic advanced literature classes planned for Fall 2009: ENGL 459 (Disaster Fiction) This class explores what the influential critic and novelist Susan Sontag called "the imagination of disaster." Sontag was speaking of Hollywood cinema of the fifties and sixties, arguing that end-of-the-world films of this era simultaneously aestheticize destruction and address a… Continue reading Fall 2009 Course Descriptions
Writing is a Concentrated Form of Thinking
One of my friends from grad school, Tim Carmody, blogged a nice response to my recent posts on critical thinking and writing, and it got me thinking that I need to clarify one thing: I am not anti-writing. As I wrote in my comment on Tim's blog (and am copying here), I want to emphasize… Continue reading Writing is a Concentrated Form of Thinking