Tag: Modern Thought and Literature

MTL/Intermediations Presents: Regina Schober, “Female Algorithmic Selfhood, Literary Fiction, and the Digital Pharmakon,” March 6, 2024

The Program in Modern Thought and Literature and Intermediations invite you to attend a lunch-time talk with Professor Regina Schober (American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf) on Female Algorithmic Selfhood, Literary Fiction, and the Digital Pharmakon. 

This event will be taking place in the Terrace Room in Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460, 4th Floor, room 426) on March 6th at 11am.

Lunch will be provided. If you are planning to intend, we invite you fill out an RSVP form for logistics and headcount. RSVPs are appreciated but not required. We ask that if you RSVP that you do so by March 1st.

If you have any questions or concerns about this event, please do not hesitate to reach out to Leah Chase at lachase@stanford.edu

Abstract:

While algorithms have increasingly come to shape the ways of writing the self, for example through data tracking and recording, personalized recommendation systems, and online identity curation, literary fiction has simultaneously negotiated such ways of being in and experiencing our algorithmically driven, digital environment. This talk will look at a selection of contemporary US American novels that critically inquire into modes of algorithmic self-writing, as they scrutinize the ways in which digital affect, automated scripts, and the dynamics of the attention economy play into the construction of selfhood. With a particular focus on female digital experiences, this talk reframes posthuman perspectives on human-/technology interactions in emphasizing affective and collective spaces of the “digital pharmakon” (Stiegler 2012). At the same time, these novels explore their own intermedial potential as counter-attentional forms in negotiating the ‘failed knowledges’ of scripting the digital female self.

About the speaker:

Regina Schober is Professor of American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. Her research interests include literary negotiations of networks and algorithmic selfhood, theories of failure, and intermediality. She is author of ‘Spiderweb, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk: Networks in US-American Literature and Culture’ (De Gruyter, 2023), of ‘Unexpected Chords: Musicopoetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics’ (Winter, 2011), editor of ‘Data Fiction: Naturalism, Numbers, Narrative’ (special issue of Studies in American Naturalism, with James Dorson, 2017), ‘The Failed Individual: Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the Pleasure of Non-Conformity’ (Campus, 2017, with Katharina Motyl) of ‘Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self’ (Transcript, with Ulfried Reichardt, 2020), and of ‘Network Theory and American Studies’ (Special Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2015, with Ulfried Reichardt and Heike Schäfer. She is part of the DFG Research Network ‘The Failure of Knowledge/Knowledges of Failure’, the DFG Research Network ‘Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge’, and the interdisciplinary BMBF Project ‘AI4All’.

Intermediations/MTL Presents: Ruth Mayer, “The ‘Girl’ in Weimar Germany,” February 22

I am very excited to be hosting Ruth Mayer, Professor of American Studies at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, for a series of events at Stanford this quarter. The Program in Modern Thought & Literature nominated her as an International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she’ll present her current research in March. First, though, there are two events in MTL:

The Program in Modern Thought and Literature invites you to a special event: On Thursday, February 22, at 4pm in the Terrace Room (4th floor, Margaret Jacks Hall), Professor Ruth Mayer will be giving a talk titled “The ‘Girl’ in Weimar Germany:  Illustrated Magazines in Trans-Atlantic Circulation.” The talk will be followed by a reception with food and drink.

Please RSVP here by Tuesday, February 20, so that we have a head-count.

The talk explores the ways in which illustrated magazines of the Weimar period act contribute to a larger gendering of transnational exchange particularly through image-text doubling and shifts. It takes the Weimar society magazine Uhu as a major reference point, investigating how it modeled itself on American lifestyle and ‘smart’ magazines and made use of the iconic figure of the ‘Girl’ to carve out a spatiotemporal continuum between ‘Amerika’ and Europe. While the Girl is a figure of the stage and screen as much as of the modern magazine, it is in the magazine that this figure comes into her own. The Girl incorporates modernity as a multimodal and multifaceted configuration much like the modern magazine itself. The talk argues that the Girl enters the illustrated magazines not only as a subject matter but also as a tool of gendered self-reflection, particularly in the work of female writers, illustrators and photographers.

Prof. Ruth Mayer holds the chair of American Studies, teaching American literature and culture from the 17th century to the present time, with a strong focus on theoretical and formal questions. Her research focuses on aspects of popular culture (particularly seriality and serialization), media history, globalization, science studies, and cultural contact. Her book Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Super-Villain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology appeared in 2013 with Temple University Press and in 2019 she co-edited Modernities and Modernization in the United States (Winter). She is currently directing the research projects “Contingency and Contraction: Modernity and Temporality in the United States, 1880-1920″ and “Multiplication: Modernity, Mass Culture, Gender.” The Program in Modern Thought and Literature is currently hosting Prof. Mayer as an International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center.

In addition to the talk on 2/22, Prof. Mayer will also be holding a workshop session for grad students on the following day, 2/23, from 11am-2pm in the Terrace Room. Lunch will be served.

»Post-Cinematic Bodies« US Book Launch, November 6, 2023

On November 6, 2023 at 5:30 pm in the Margaret Jacks Hall Terrace Room (Building 460, Room 426), I will be presenting my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), along with responses by Professor Scott Bukatman (Film & Media Studies, Stanford), and Dr. Annika Butler-Wall (Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Stanford MTL Ph.D. ’23).

Food and drinks will be provided. The first 40 attendees will receive a free copy of the book.

RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Please RSVP using the linked form by October 30th if you plan on attending.

About the book:

“How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.”

Speaker and Respondents

Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and of Communication in Stanford’s Department of Communication. He is currently the Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Art History. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms.

Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema.

Dr. Annika Butler-Wall is a Lecturer in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher working at the intersections of gender studies, media studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Her current research project explores how digital platforms are restructuring forms of historically feminized labor by examining platforms such as TaskRabbit, Yelp, and LinkedIn Learning. 

She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University and a BA in American Studies and Economics from Wesleyan University. Her research has been supported by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Ric Weiland Graduate Research Fellowship among others.  

This event is sponsored by The Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Intermediations.

Intermediations: Patrick Jagoda, “Metagames and Media Aesthetics” (January 27, 2023)

Recently, I announced an upcoming event featuring the Game Changer Lab Chicago, founded by Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, as part of the new Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. I am pleased now to announce another event featuring Patrick Jagoda, the following day, as part of my other new initiative this year at Stanford: the Intermediations series, which is dedicated to exploring the intersections of intermediality and interdisciplinarity.

On January 27, at 12pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall, Professor Jagoda of the University of Chicago will be presenting on “Metagames and Media Aesthetics.” Please see below for an abstract and bio, and hope to see some of you there!

“Metagames and Media Aesthetics”

Broadly circulating humanistic terms such as “metafiction” (William H. Gass), “metapictures” (WJT Mitchell), and “metacomics” (M. Thomas Inge) point to heightened self-reflexivity within a medium or form. Particularly since the 2010s, we have seen an increased volume of “metagames” or games about games that include prominent independent game examples such as The Stanley Parable (2013),Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017), and There is No Game (2020). This presentation explores different theories and categories of metagames en route to the question of why metagames are so important to understanding our contemporary media ecology in 2023. Video games in general, and metagames in particular, call for an expanded sense of media aesthetics that exceed Roland Barthes’s earlier triumvirate of image, music, and text. This talk theorizes the videogame sensorium and its broader implications for media studies.

Bio:

Patrick Jagoda is the William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab, as well as co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016 with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022 with Ireashia Bennett and Ashlyn Sparrow). He has also co-edited five special issues or edited volumes, and published over fifty essays and interviews. Patrick designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game Terrarium (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design. He is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Video: Mads Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Intermediations, Nov. 16, 2022)

Video from the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” from November 16, 2022.

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen sketches out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. His most recently submitted publication is a short book on the concept and history of text.

He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008),The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson ofLiterature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, includingWorld Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012),Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020). 

Intermediations: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Nov. 16)

As the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen will be giving a talk titled “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” on November 16, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall room 426).

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen will sketch out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. His most recently submitted publication is a short book on the concept and history of text.

He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008),The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson ofLiterature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, includingWorld Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012),Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020). 

Thomsen has been director of the Digital Arts Initiative (2017-21) and the research program Human Futures (2016-22), both at Aarhus University. Thomsen was co-director of the research project Posthuman Aesthetics (2014-18), and he is the PI of the VELUX FONDEN-funded project Fabula-NET which investigates literary preferences and quality using digital methods (2021-25).

He is a co-editor of Orbis Litterarum, an advisory board member of the book series Literatures as World Literature(Bloomsbury Academic), and a member of the editorial board of Journal of World Literature. Thomsen is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-), the advisory board of The Institute for World Literature (2010-13, 2018-22), and the general assembly of DARIAH (2022-).

Thomsen was a visiting scholar at Stanford University four times between 2001-2015. 

“Keeping It Unreal” — Darieck Scott, Monica P. Moore Lecture in Modern Thought & Literature

On November 10, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall), the Program in Modern Thought & Literature will be hosting Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, for the Monica P. Moore Speaker Series. Professor Scott will be talking about Black queer fantasy and superhero comics, the topic of his recent book Keeping It Unreal (NYU Press, 2022).

There will be two respondents: Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film & Media Studies at Stanford and author of a new book on Black Panther; and Lucas Williams, Ph.D Candidate in MTL.

New Roles at Stanford

This year I am excited to have taken on a couple of new roles at Stanford, and I wanted shout about them briefly to express my gratitude and hope.

First, I am honored to have received a courtesy appointment in German Studies from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. While my primary appointment remains in the Department of Art & Art History, I will now be able to teach and advise graduate students in German as well, and I am excited to collaborate more closely with my colleagues there.

Second, I have joined the Committee in Charge in Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford’s premier interdisciplinary humanities program. I have been working closely and learning from students in the program over the past couple of years, including serving on several dissertation committees, and I have discovered so many affinities with students and faculty alike, so officially joining the program feels in many ways like coming home.

Finally, for the duration of the 2020-2021 academic year, I am honored to have been awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, where I am learning from an amazing interdisciplinary cohort of peers while developing a new project around seriality and serialization. Taking up Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “serialities” as anonymous, alienated collectives, as well as Iris Marion Young’s re-working of the concept with respect to gender and specifically feminist purposes, the project relates these socio-political conceptions of seriality to the serialization of experience and identity in contemporary digital media.

In all, I am feeling very grateful for these new and strengthened interdisciplinary networks, which give me hope for the future of the humanities at Stanford.

LIT+ Conference at Stanford

LIT+

I am very honored to be speaking alongside some very distinguished thinkers this December at the LIT+ Conference on the State of the Interdisciplines, sponsored by Stanford’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FemGen), the Stanford Law School, and the Stanford Humanities Center. Watch this space for more info soon!