Susan Morrison, "Winter Sun"
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Rob Latham is prominently featured in the January 31 issue of the Chronicle
of Higher Education, in an article entitled "The Soul of a New Machine"
by Scott Mclemee. An excerpt:
Generation Cyborg
"Part of the impact of that essay was the timing," says Rob Latham,
an associate professor of English and American studies at the University of
Iowa. "The cyborg idea was in the air. People were entering more-intimate
relationships with technology. Intellectuals started having big computers on
their desktops, for one. And the cyborg was becoming a major element of popular
culture. Haraway gave you a grip on why it was so fascinating. A lot was happening
in the image of a metallic body beneath the flesh and muscle of The Terminator."
Mr. Schwarzenegger's film opened in 1984, not long before Ms. Haraway's "Manifesto"
reached the rather smaller audience of Socialist Review. And readers of William
Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), the first of the cyberpunk novels, were discovering
a future in which information wars were fought on computer networks that plugged
directly into the nervous system.
Countless variations on such themes have emerged over the past two decades.
In Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption, Mr. Latham
interprets the social reality within those powerful science-fiction images.
For Mr. Latham, the contemporary fascination with human-machine synthesis reflects
deep changes in the economy: the shift from the primacy of the factory (in which
the routines of mass production and consumption shaped much of ordinary life)
to a postindustrial system emphasizing innovation, flexibility, and speed. Those
are values all associated with young people, whose knack for adapting to technological
change is matched only by their insatiable desire to consume. Which, in turn,
helps keep the wheels of postindustrial commerce turning.
Immersion in technology and the mass media provides youth with access to power
while also threatening to subject them to domination, whether through electronic
surveillance or plain old credit-card debt. In Mr. Latham's reading, the cyborgs
in popular fiction and film offer an imaginative reconfiguration of the experience
of being plugged into the postindustrial system. Another such image, he says,
is that of the unquenchable consumer par excellence: the vampire.
Find the entire article online at http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21a01401.htm.
Ed Folsom's new book, Whitman East and West, just appeared from University
of Iowa Press. It features essays by top Whitman scholars like Betsy Erkkila,
M. Wynn Thomas, Roger Asselineau, and James E. Miller, Jr., as well as by a
number of scholars from China, who explore Whitman's influence on Chinese poets
and Chinese culture. The essays grew out of the international Whitman conference
Folsom directed in Beijing in the fall of 2000.
Florenc e Boos' article, "'Nur's up amongst the scenes I have describ'd':
Political Resonances in the Poetry of Working-Class Women," appeared in
Functions of Victorian Culture at the present Time, ed. Christine Krueger,
Ohio University Press, 2002, 137-156.
Tom Lutz's band, Blue Tuna, has recently released a new CD, available at www.bluetunas.com.
Lectures of interest to the English Department, Spring 2003
Featuring or hosted by members of the English Department
January 22, 8:00 p.m. Calvin Trillin, Prairie Lights
January 24, 8:00 p.m. Elizabeth Crane/Robert Mailer Anderson, Prairie
Lights
January 29, 8:00 p.m. James Autry, Prairie Lights
February 3, 3:30 p.m. Medieval Studies: Martha Bayless, University
of Oregon, "The Devil in the Latrine: Sin and Excrement in Medieval Culture"
Place TBA
February 6, 12:15 p.m. Center for the Book Lunch Lecture: David Banash,
English Department,"Writing the Ready-Made: Literary Collage and the Material
Text," 2nd Floor Conference Room South, Main Library
February 6, 8:00 p.m. Betsey Brown, Prairie Lights
February 7, 8:00 p.m. Lewis Robinson, Prairie Lights
February 8, 5:00 p.m. Joe Sharpnack, Andy Singer, Scott Bateman,
Prairie Lights
February 12, 8:00 p.m. Etienne Van Heerden, Prairie Lights
February 13-16, "A Streetcar Named Desire," University Theatres Mainstage
February 14, 8:00 p.m. Paula Morris, Prairie Lights
February 20-23, "A Streetcar Named Desire," University Theatres Mainstage
February 21-23, Lisa Day, "Flying Lessons," University Theatres Gallery
February 27, 8:00 p.m. Sanjay Nigam, Prairie Lights
February 27, 7:30 p.m. Wendy Heller, Music History, Princeton University, Handel Society Annual Meeting and featured speaker in the 18th and 19th Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium: European Empires Series "Handel Meets Nero: Hamburg, Venice and Imperial Rome" http://www.sun.rhbnc.ac.uk/Music/Conferences/03-3-han.html
February 28-March 2, W. B. Yeats, "Uncontrollable Mystery," University Theatres Mainstage
February 28, 8:00 p.m. Nick Arvin, Prairie Lights
February 28 - the English Department hosts a one-day symposium
entitled "Approaching Technoculture" that will focus on issues and
methods in the developing interdisciplinary field of technoculture studies.
There will be two topical panels: the first, on Race and Technoculture, will
be chaired by Brooks Landon and will feature Doris Witt, of the UI's English
Department, and De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Associate Professor of English at the
University of Indiana; the second, on Technoculture and Science Fiction, will
be chaired by Rob Latham and will feature Roger Luckhurst, Professor of English
at the University of London, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Professor of English
at DePauw University. The panels will be held back-to-back starting at 2 p.m.
in 107 EPB.
February 28-March 1, James F. Jakobsen Graduate Forum featuring
English Department students
March 1 Deadline to submit proposals for special sessions or individual papers for the 2003 M/MLA, which will be held this year November 7-9 in Chicago. The informal theme of the conference is "The University," but proposals are not restricted to the topic. See the M/MLA's website at http://www.uiowa.edu/~mmla for membership, special session proposal forms, and further information about the 2003 convention.
March 5-9, W. B. Yeats, "Uncontrollable Myster." University Theatres Mainstage
March 6, 12:15 p.m. Leo and Jon Lee, Center for the Book, "Contemporary European Papermaking and Paper Mills," 2nd Floor Conference Room South, Main Library
March 7, 4:00 p.m. American Studies Floating Fridays: Ricardo Salvator, IFUSS visitor, Professor of History, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentine: "Practical Pan-Americanism: Business and Official Rhetoric in the Making of an Informal Empire," 7th floor, Jefferson Building
March 11, 8:00 p.m. Louise Erdrich, Prairie Lights
March 27-29, Stephanie Richards, "Southern Women," University Theatres Gallery
March 27-28, American Studies: David Hall, Ida Beam visitor, details TBA
March 28-30, Craft, Critique, Culture Conference. For more information, see: http://www.uiowa.edu/~c3conf/
April 7, 4:00 p.m. Anne Basting Davis, Director of the Center for the Study of Aging and an award winning playwright, will be here to discuss her play, Timeslips, and the theories of identity and narrative that have inspired her use of narrative as a means to communicate with Alzheimer's patients and to capture their experiences in theater. See her website, http://www.timeslips.org, for stunning photographs of the project.
April 7, 8:00 p.m. Patricia Hampl, Prairie Lights (hosted by the Nonfiction Writing Program)
April 11-12, Mid American American Studies Association and Great Lakes American Studies Association meets here, details TBA
April 14, 7:30 p.m. Todd Porterfield, Art Historian, University of Montreal, "Parisian Conquests of Egyp," 18th and 19th Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium: European Empires Series in E109 Art Building. Reception following.
April 18, 4:00 p.m. English Department Lecture Series: Cheryl Herr, "Smuggling Stories," Gerber Lounge
April 24, 4:00 p.m. Priya Joshi, English Department, Washington University, "Hindi Film," South Asian Seminar, Phillips Hall
April 25, 4:00 p.m. Priya Joshi, English Department, Washington University, " "Public Culture, Private Selves: The Social Lives of Institutions in Nineteenth-Century India," English Department Lectures Series and 18th and 19th Century Interdisciplinary Colloquium: European Empires Series. Gerber Lounge. Reception following at 1157 E. Court St.
May 2, 4:00 p.m. English Department Lecture Series: Florence
Boos, "Fanny Forrester: A Working-Class Woman Poet and the Limits of Language."
Gerber Lounge.
Cheryl Herr has been invited to lecture at the James Joyce Summer School, scheduled
for July of 2003. The two-week program, widely viewed as the most prestigious
international venue for Joyce scholars, draws students to Dublin from around
the world. Lectures are held in the room portrayed in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man where the Dean of Studies and Stephen Dedalus discuss
aesthetics and the definition of "tundish."
The Book Culture Brown Bag will next feature David Banash of the English Department,
presenting his talk, "Writing the Ready-Made: Literary Collage and the
Material Text," on Thursday, February 6th, 12:15-1:15, 2nd Floor Conference
Room South, Main Library. *New site.* Mark your calendars and please join us!
A journal of New Media and experimental writing and art, The Iowa Review Web is published at the University of Iowa with support from the Department of English and in collaboration with The International Writing Program and the Iowa Review.
Volume 5, Number 1 (February 2003)
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/
William Poundstone's ground-breaking New Media piece, premiering in this issue
of TIR Web, is loosely inspired by the story-telling automata in Raymond
Roussel's novel Locus Solus. Be sure to read the FAQ section. Poundstone
makes this obscure allusion less so - and he connects Roussel's narrative devices
to contemporary issues of electronic literature.
View Poundstone's 3 PROPOSALS FOR BOTTLE IMPS at http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/poundstone03/index.html
William Poundstone is the author of eight books - two of them, The Recursive Universe and Labyrinths of Reason, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, How Would You Move Mount Fuji?,will be published by Little, Brown in May 2003.
John Cayley: An interview with Brian Kim Stefans. And new work by Caley.
John Caley won the ELO's first annual award in digital poetry in 2001 (http://www.eliterature.org/Awards2001/index.shtml). Most recently, he published a lengthy commentary in the Electronic Book Review called "The Code is not the Text (Unless it is the Text)."
Brian Kim Stefans is the author of three books of poetry, including Free Space Comix (Roof, 1998). He edits the Web site Arras, devoted to new media poetry.
From the interview:
"It's interesting to reflect on what seemed to be going on when I began
to attend conferences devoted to 'hypertext' and, later, 'digital literature'
in late 1990s. I'd been making literary experiments with text using personal
computers since the late 1970s. So had many others, as an adjunct to many distinct
varieties of textual practice. Sadly, they seem to have shared remarkably little
intercommunication. Why would bp nichol necessarily want to tell the OuLiPo
what he was doing with his Apple II? It was only after the World Wide Web, as
it were, 'went public' in 1994 that it was suddenly possible to conceive of
a community of practice and a more general audience for writing in networked
and programmable media, for writing that was made for and delivered by these
media. This is not to say that much such writing actually existed. The idea
that 'new' textual media might be generalized and shared had only just emerged.
There were a small number of practitioners, a small number of systems for composing
text in digital media and a growing realization that at some indeterminate point
in the future an indeterminate quantity of text and textual practice would migrate
to the new 'writing space' of networked
programmatons."
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/cayley/index.html
Motomichi Nakamura's "BCC." And in interview with Chang and Voge.
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/motomichi/index.html
FROM 91 MERIDIAN
S. Diwakar is a Kannada short-story writer, a translator, and an editor in the
Office of Public Affairs at the American Consulate in Chennai (India). He spent
the fall of 2002 in Iowa City as a resident at the IWP.
Read "The World"
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/91-03/feb/index.html
Coming up: Interviews, criticism, and New Media work by Stuart Moulthrop, DianaSlattery, Talan Memmott, and many others.
Reading Matters will appear on the Web and in faculty inboxes every other Wednesday as a combination of memos from the chair, announcements, deadlines, publication announcements, notices of speakers, conferences, and visitors of interest to the department. To be included in Reading Matters, announcements should be e-mailed to Amanda at am_17@hotmail.com by Monday afternoon.
Copyright © 2003, The University of Iowa. All rights reserved.