Adventures in Academia: Critical Theory Invades My Mailbox

I'm amused.  I didn't ask for them, but Oxford University Press sent me two books on critical theory and interpreting literature.  They are:

1. How to Interpret Literature:  Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Dale Parker
   (A fairly small book containing sections exploring the major fields of criticism -- structuralism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, etc.)
2. Critical Theory:  A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Dale Parker
   (A much larger book providing actual readings from the major fields of criticism -- Fanon, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, White, Propp, and so on and so forth.)

Now, I suspect these are meant to be texts assigned together, since they are by the same author and serve drastically different functions for learning goals.  Unfortunately, I don't teach critical theory on its own...yet.  I might one day.  I do, however, teach literature courses, which I find are benefited by intense discussion of literary theory, for which the first, smaller book might prove useful.  I'm currently using a book called Texts and Contexts:  Writing and Literature and Critical Theory by Steve J. Lynn from Pearson; I quite like it, but have run into the awful problem of students not reading the assigned readings.

Parker's smaller book, however, might prove more beneficial to me in the future, as its sections are broken down into smaller pieces (Lynn's book couples together all the schools of cultural and historical criticism into one chapter, whereas Parker splits them out).  Likewise, it seems to get into the particulars of these discourses in a way Lynn's book does not, though this is from a very limited, cursory glance which might prove false in the future.

This does not mean I'm going to suddenly drop Lynn for Parker; rather, it means I have some thinking to do for future courses.  Either way, I am excited to have these books, even if I can't justify teaching the monstrous tome containing some amazing selections from important figures in critical theory.  Now I really want to teach such a class...desperately... I wonder if OUP would let me create a book that crams together parts of each book.  That would be amazing.

Anywhoodles!

(Originally posted on Google+ in a slightly different form.

What Star Trek Desperately Needs

I'm currently enjoying Enterprise, one of the least-liked of the various Star Trek incarnations.  I won't say that Enterprise is the worst of the lot; in many ways, it has the great adventure and anthological introspection commonly found in everything from Star Trek to The Next Generation to Voyager (and, I suppose, DS9 -- my least favorite).  Yet despite that, I think the problem with Enterprise is precisely that it maintains the format Star Trek fans have become familiar with in every single previous incarnation available.  It's an anthology show.  Every episode offers some new idea, which has to be explored and resolved, more or less, in 45 minutes.  What little overarching plot the show offered was pretty much irrelevant, except at random junctures the creators decided would serve as "connectors" to the series premiere.

Think about it.  The original Star Trek set the stage.  Captain Kirk and his crew set off to explore the universe, discovering new species, different cultures, and so on and so forth.  The Next

Postcolonialism 101: Misery Tourism (or, How the Genre Community Still Essentializes Africa)

"What is misery tourism?" you might ask.  At its most basic, "misery tourism" refers to the ways peoples from wealthy, usually Western nations "tour" the "developing" or "undeveloped" world in order to "learn" something.  The process is almost always attached to an assumption of superiority, whether directly acknowledged or buried in the subconscious.  To partake in misery tourism is to justify the superior position of your culture by intentionally subjecting yourself to "lesser" cultures (as a means of justifying the bias embedded in the notion of "lesser" cultures).  To put it another way, misery tourism is what (mostly white) Westerners do to make themselves feel better about their own circumstances.

I bring this up because of the following, which is taken from Bryan Thomas Schmidt's blog post entitled "Broadening the Toolbox Through Cross-Cultural Encounters:  On Resnick, Africa, and Opportunity":

Adventures in Teaching Literature: David Henry Hwang and the Ethnic Debate

In an attempt to bring some of what I do as a teacher (and, in other posts, as an academic) to this blog, I've decided to start these little "Adventures in Teaching Literature" posts to explore my class experiences.  Some of these will focus on what I take from a text (or tried to teach my students to take from it) and others will deal with their responses, which will vary from profound to odd to incorrect-but-still-quite-interesting (I'm not sold on the use of "incorrect" here, though).

Now to today's post:

David Henry Hwang and the Ethnic Debate

If you're not familiar with Hwang's work, that is unfortunate.  While he is not remotely a genre writer, his plays are quite brilliant.  He is perhaps best known for M. Butterfly, which won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play and was based on a true story (I once saw an opera version of the story in San Francisco, which was written by Giacomo Puccini and premiered in 1904 -- that version was

Aliens: How Would Their Existence Effect You?

I can't say that I've thought long and hard about this question before.  This seems somewhat strange to me, since it is a question I would be naturally inclined to think about anyway, both as a giddy supporter of expanding human exploration of space and as a science fiction writer.  That's the way things go, I guess.

In any case, I'd like to take the opportunity here to explore, however briefly, how the proven existence of aliens would affect me.  And then I'd like to know how you would respond to the same question!  Leave a comment.

Aliens!  They're Alive!

Those that know me well enough (or pay attention to my online existence) will also know a few things about me which are relevant to this discussion:

Adventures in Atheism: Absens Communitatis

(Cross-posted from my Google+ account.)

I suspect everyone knows this already, but I'm an atheist.  What does that mean?  I don't believe God or Allah or whatever other deity others subscribe to.  That's pretty much it.  I'm not interesting in preaching about why atheism is the RIGHTEST WAY EVAR or how you should subscribe to my version of morality or why believing in God is just super dumb.  To be honest, I just don't care.  If you believe in God and it works for you, then have at it.  Please.  Worship God.  Go about your business.  Do the religious thing.  Just leave me alone with it.  Don't make laws based solely on your religious tenets and don't look at me like I'm some heathen who will eat your children's souls just because I don't subscribe to your version of a particular religion.  That's pretty much my opinion on religion in public life:  there shouldn't be one.

But that's a much larger discussion.  What bothers me about being an atheist is the lack of community.  When I say that, I'm fully aware that communities exist, but in my experience, those communities are part of the side of atheism that, well, I just don't want to engage in.  My lack of

Dear @Ustream: You Are Forgiven

You'll know from my previous post and Twitter and basically everywhere else that Ustream shut the Hugo Awards live stream down Neil Gaiman's acceptance speech.  The reasoning at the time was "copyright infringement."  Now we know what happened from Ustream's end (granted, I'm late to the party, but I feel obligated to say something after smashing Ustream on Twitter and my blog earlier this week):