I will be giving a talk this Friday, June 4 on digital books and issues of copyright at the Oxford English Postgraduate Conference. (Click on the image below to go to the Oxford English Department’s website announcement).

[Update: the full conference schedule and program is available. Click here to check it out].

Oxford English Postgraduate Conference

Phillip Pullman will also be taking part in a discussion during the latter part of the conference, which promises to be a very interesting event. You can click on the image below to visit the conference website with a bit more information:

Mis/Appropriation Conference

My talk will be at 2:10pm and at 3:10pm I will be chairing a panel of speakers, on the interesting topics of the ethics and experience of time and space in reading (link goes to the full schedule online):

Conference Schedule

Will post some excerpts from the conference later!

On Thursday, May 20 I’ll be speaking on the topic of digital books and the experience of reading at the Merton History of the Book Group at Oxford. There will be free sandwiches. (Click on the picture for a larger image).

Merton History of the Book Group Talk

"eBooks, Google Books, (and Printed Books): Reading in the Age of Digital Reproduction."

“Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.

-  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The riddle without an answer is an apt recurring theme in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, the newest and most ambitious iteration of the much loved classic. While there are familiar characters and scenes, this new rendition is more sequel than adaptation. And yet here is the riddle: what sort of story is it?

Alice, now 19 years old, escapes from the real world and its depressingly grown-up hassles down the rabbit hole, but has no memory of her past adventures. Characters in the movie wonder if this Alice – who has apparently lost her “muchness” since her previous visit – might be the wrong Alice. Who is Alice, who was she, and who will she be?

Unlike the Lewis Carroll stories, there is less a sense of wandering wonder; here now we have a very different story reminiscent of a Joseph Campbell-inspired quest for Alice to remember what she had forgotten and to realize her sense of self. The admirable pacing of the plot reflects this. There’s no time for childlike indulgence at tea parties this time around before being rushed off to the next danger: there’s work to be done.  Fate, determinism and free will are some of the central themes – how can Alice choose her own path, as she is determined to do, if destiny has already foretold that she is the one to take up the Vorpal Sword and save the day?

The world that Alice now returns to is much changed. Underland, as it is now called, is a darker place, an amalgamation of Wonderland and the Looking Glass worlds from the original stories. We find not a child’s escape into a world of wonder, but rather a curiously post apocalyptic dreamscape where the problems of the real world are meant to be worked out in a dramatic setting. This is the setting not for wonder and logic games, but rather for a rite of passage narrative that is parts Joan of Arc and St. George, complete with battles between good and evil writ large.

Of course, one must account for the film not just in terms of story, but as a story told through Tim Burton-esque cinematic art as well.  Burton imagines a captivating and immersive world, but one that is distinctively less dreamlike and more nightmarish in his signature gothic treatment. We have a glimpse through the 3-D looking glasses at a darker, creepier Wonderland than we have ever seen before. The visual story that is being told is one of desolation and darkness – perhaps the implicit question to be asked in such a style is that, in the absence of wonder (from “wonder” to “under”), what then is there?

Perhaps the charm of Lewis Carroll’s stories were that they were an exploration of wonder, that if we believe wonder to be never-ending, then such stories are riddles which resist sequels and conventional resolution. Such is the challenge of working within an old story is how to make the familiar unfamiliar. The movie is its own riddle without an answer – should timeless stories require an ending?

[Full review will be posted soon on The Oxonian Review website]

(Brief excerpt of my latest book review)

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

Ken Auletta

Penguin Press, 2009

400 pages

“I fear theirs is an old story about how good people deceive themselves.”

The sentence sounds more befitting of a Thomas Hardy novel – instead, it’s a vaguely foreboding sentiment about one the world’s most trusted and ubiquitous companies: Google. Despite the title of Ken Auletta’s book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, the narrative that Auletta traces is not just the story of a single company, but rather a story of how the advent of Internet and new media innovation have altered society in long-reaching ways (Think of “The End of the World as We Know It” more in the R.E.M., and less in the post-apocalyptic sense, and you follow Auletta’s logic). The author sees Google as an ideal focal point through which to examine this brave new digital world, primarily because it has for many people Google has become seemingly synonymous with the Internet. “The world has been Googled,” writes Auletta. “Googled” in the usage which Auletta employs throughout the book denotes anything which is swept up and fundamentally altered by the wave of technological change that has characterized the past decade. Sometimes this technological know-how outpaces our capacity to fully grasp its significance or to fully adapt around it – “Googled” in this context carries both a positive and negative connotation. Such is the nature of the Internet as a medium – or perhaps any medium – that can be characterized by rapid change: “because the Internet inevitably destroys old ways of doing things,” Auletta writes that it entails “creative destruction.”

It’s clear that Auletta—a longtime writer for The New Yorker on the Internet’s cultural impact—wants the reader to recognize Google as a profoundly influential media company with far-reaching ambitions: “If you can solve search, that means you can answer any question. Which means you can do basically anything.”

[Full review will be up soon on The Oxonian Review website]