Echoes of RUR

Here are a couple of videos that resonate with themes from RUR. Please post others on your own blogs or as comments--they seem to be everywhere. And, in class the novels/films I mentioned were Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Children of Men. You might also check out a movie called Moon directed by Duncan Jones.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Here's a link to the Gates talk at Mondavi Center next week.

Bill Nye, Science Guy, and a Virtual Reality reality check.

Follow this link about a lecture at USC where Bill Nye, Science Guy, passed out and the student audience sat there tweeting and facebooking about it while no one checked to see if he was okay...

Cairo and Online Social Networking

Last week we talked a little about Gary Shteyngart's SSTLS and the way online social networking has played a significant role in the recent revolutions in the Middle East. Here are a couple of pics.

The Chinese are Coming

Alongside our reading of Super Sad True Love Story, here is a recent documentary about the rising influence of China across the globalizing globe.

Carbon dating and a literary outlier.

Follow this link to a story about a 14th-Century book and the recent turn in its history due to carbon dating discoveries about its materials.

And here is the link to a cool photo gallery of the book's pages with illustrations.

M Butterfly blog, due Feb 13

Hi LitBloggers!

For this blog entry, please write a 300-400 word response to the film M Butterfly, which you just screened in class. In many ways, this film brings together the same themes as Shteyngart's SSTLS: gender, ethnicity, politics, art, and love. Please write your response about some configuration of these multiple themes. For example, you might write a response that compares/contrasts the film's intersections of these with SSTLS. Or, you might simply stick to the movie. Please post your writing before class on Monday.

The future of noir fiction

Here's a pretty cool manifesto, written in 2003 but just published online recently, that argues about what must happen if noir fiction is to survive and thrive.

Blog writing assignment, due Monday Feb 7th

Hi LitBloggers,

For Monday, we're reading pp 72-196 of SSTLS. I want you to do a kind of Brainstorm Extension response writing.
First, choose one of the themes from the essay #2 assignment sheet or one of your own. Next, choose 3 passages in the reading for Monday that relate to that theme. Then, brainstorm. I'd like to see you talk about what each passages says about the theme; why the passage stands out; how the passage relates to the theme in the novel on the whole; and other reactions to each passage that you have.

300-400 words and please have it posted before class. This is a good chance to get ideas cooking up for the essay, so think a bit about which theme you'd like. That said, this does not commit you to the theme.

SSTLS Trailer

Here's the video that screened on Youtube to promote the book before it launched.