We're back, trying to steer the floundering ship of the humanities through the turbulent waters of the global crisis...In other words, we're back and the coffee in Webb is still terrible.
Let's open the new year with congratulating two graduate students who have reached the Holy Grail of the academy: publications!
Shawn Edrei has two essays accepted for inclusion in two prestigious anthologies:
The first is The Devil that We Know: Evil in American Pop Culture, to be published by Praeger/ABC-Clio, 2013. His paper is on evil video games, the subject that seems to me a little tautological since as my kids were growing up, I believed ALL video games were evil.
The second is Issues of Control: Reading and Playing Video Games, probably from McFarland. Shawn's essay, not surprisinly, deals with the narratological aspects of the player's control.
Tom Shapira's book The Cure for Postmodern Blues is slated to be published by Sequart Research and Publication Group. Tom also gave a very interesting talk at the Future of Humanity conference at Van Leer Institute.
I invite both Shawn and Tom to share details of their work with our community. But I just wanted to say that we are very proud of you. Way to go, guys!
Let's open the new year with congratulating two graduate students who have reached the Holy Grail of the academy: publications!
Shawn Edrei has two essays accepted for inclusion in two prestigious anthologies:
The first is The Devil that We Know: Evil in American Pop Culture, to be published by Praeger/ABC-Clio, 2013. His paper is on evil video games, the subject that seems to me a little tautological since as my kids were growing up, I believed ALL video games were evil.
The second is Issues of Control: Reading and Playing Video Games, probably from McFarland. Shawn's essay, not surprisinly, deals with the narratological aspects of the player's control.
Tom Shapira's book The Cure for Postmodern Blues is slated to be published by Sequart Research and Publication Group. Tom also gave a very interesting talk at the Future of Humanity conference at Van Leer Institute.
I invite both Shawn and Tom to share details of their work with our community. But I just wanted to say that we are very proud of you. Way to go, guys!
Wow. :)
ReplyDeleteWell, first of all, no academic achievement exists in a vacuum - this wouldn't have been possible without Prof. Gomel and all the inspiration she's provided me over the years. I also have to thank Meyrav Koren-Kuik for sending the "Evil in American Pop Culture" CFP my way.
It's no coincidence that both of my upcoming essays deal with the medium of video games (or that there just happened to be two different publishers looking for papers on the subject) - having dedicated my MA thesis to the study of narratology in non-textual literary platforms, it seems to me that the technology of contemporary games has advanced to the point where they're now capable of telling complex, sophisticated stories in ways that are singularly unique to the medium. Whether it's the consistent ontological framework of online games or the player's ability to control the sequence of events in the plot, new narrative techniques and paradigms are emerging all the time - some of which seem to fly in the face of established literary theories. I'm very excited to delve into this field, especially because academic circles are starting to recognize this growing interest in video games as literature and will hopefully respond accordingly...