Jay Clayton
Jay Clayton received his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before coming to Vanderbilt, he taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. At Vanderbilt, he teaches courses in contemporary American literature; genetics in literature, film, and media; Victorian fiction; hypermedia and online gaming; and literary theory.
His current research involves the ethical and social issues raised by genetics as they appear in literature and films. He has lectured on genetics and literature at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH, the English Institute, the MLA, the Narrative Society, Society for Literature and Science, and medical schools around the country.
Address: Department of English
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37212
His current research involves the ethical and social issues raised by genetics as they appear in literature and films. He has lectured on genetics and literature at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH, the English Institute, the MLA, the Narrative Society, Society for Literature and Science, and medical schools around the country.
Address: Department of English
Vanderbilt University
Nashville, TN 37212
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From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and visitors alike.
Literature, Science, and Public Policy shows how literature can influence public policy concerning scientific controversies in genetics and other areas. Literature brings unique insights to issues involving cloning, GMOs, gene editing, and more by dramatizing their full human complexity. Literature's value for public policy is demonstrated by striking examples that range from the literary response to evolution in the Victorian era through the modern synthesis of evolution and genetics in the mid-twentieth century to present-day genomics. Outlining practical steps for humanists who want to help shape public policy, this book offers vivid readings of novels by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, Aldous Huxley, Robert Heinlein, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Gary Shteyngart, and others that illustrate the important insights that literary studies can bring to debates about science and society.
Charles Dickens in Cyberspace opens a window on a startling set of literary and scientific links between contemporary American culture and the nineteenth-century heritage it often repudiates. Surveying a wide range of novelists, scientists, filmmakers, and theorists from the past two centuries, Jay Clayton traces the concealed circuits that connect the telegraph with the Internet, Charles Babbage's Difference Engine with the digital computer, Frankenstein's monster with cyborgs and clones, and Dickens' life and fiction with all manner of contemporary popular culture--from comic books and advertising to recent novels and films. In the process, Clayton argues for two important principles: that postmodernism has a hidden or repressed connection with the nineteenth-century and that revealing those connections can aid in the development of a historical cultural studies. In Charles Dickens in Cyberspace nineteenth-century figures--Jane Austen, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Paxton, Mary Shelley, and Mary Somerville--meet a lively group of counterparts from today: Andrea Barrett, Greg Bear, Peter Carey, Hélène Cixous, Alfonso Cuarón, William Gibson, Donna Haraway, David Lean, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Ridley Scott, Susan Sontag, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, and Tom Stoppard. The juxtaposition of such a diverse cast of characters leads to a new way of understanding the "undisciplined culture" the two eras share, an understanding that can suggest ways to heal the gap that has long separated literature from science. Combining storytelling and scholarship, this engaging study demonstrates in its own practice the value of a self-reflective stance toward cultural history. Its personal voice, narrative strategies, multiple points of view, recursive loops, and irony emphasize the improvisational nature of the methods it employs. Yet its argument is serious and urgent: that the afterlife of the nineteenth century continues to shape the present in diverse and sometimes conflicting ways.
Preface: Driving through Babel
Culture/Narrative/Power
The Story of Deconstruction
Theories of Desire
The Narrative Turn in Minority Writing
Rituals of Change: Ethnography on the Border
Feminism and the Politics of Community
Conclusion: Literature without Masterpieces
Part I
Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, "Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality"
Part II
Jay Clayton, "The Alphabet of Suffering: Effie Deans, Tess Durbeyfield, Martha Ray, and Hetty Sorrel"
Tilottam Rajan, "Intertextuality and the Subject of Reading / Writing"
A. N. Doane, "Oral Texts, Intertexts, and Intratexts: Editing Old English"
Eric Rothstein, "Diversity and Change in Literary Histories"
Part III
Susan Stanford Friedman, "Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author"
Thomas Schaub, "Allusion and Intertext: History in The End of the Road"
Cyrena N. Pondrom, "Influence? or Intertextuality?: The Complicated Connection of Edith Sitwell with Gertrude Stein"
Lynn Keller, "'For inferior who is free?': Liberating the Woman Writer in Marianne Moore's 'Marriage'"
Andrew D. Weiner, "Sidney/Spenser/Shakespeare: Influence/Intertextuality/Intention"
Jeffrey Steele, "The Call of Eurydice: Mourning and Intertextuality in Margaret Fuller's Writing"
William L. Andrews, "Inter(racial)textuality in Nineteenth-Century Southern Narrative"
Betsy Draine, "Chronotope and Intertext: The Case of Jean Rhys's Quartet"
The course is designed as a university-level English literature class—a multi-genre, multimedia tour of how literature, film, and games engage in the basic human activity of storytelling. Our journey will enable us to learn something about narrative theory, introduce us to some key topics in media studies and cover some of the history and theory of video games. It will also take us to some landmarks of romance literature, the neverending story that lies behind most fantasy games: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a bit of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and poems by Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and others.
Drawing on centuries of romance narrative conventions, the twenty-first century gaming industry has become a creative and economic powerhouse. It engages the talents of some of our brightest writers, artists, composers, computer engineers, game theorists, video producers, and marketing professionals, and in 2012, it generated an estimated $64 billion in revenue. Anyone interested in today’s culture needs to be conversant with the ways this new medium is altering our understanding of stories. Join me as we set out on an intellectual adventure, the quest to discover the cultural heritage of online games.
In this seminar we will concentrate on dystopian fictions and films such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca (1997), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazua Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005), and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), as well as other recent novels such as Ian McEwan;s Saturday (2005) and Richard Powers’s Generosity (2009); science fiction stories by Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, and Greg Egan; and theoretical texts in science studies by Lorraine Daston, Lennard Davis, Peter Galison, Sander Gilman, John Guillory, Evelyn Fox Keller, Nikolas Rose, Steven Shapin, Priscilla Wald, and Lisa Zunshine.
To provide hands-on experience in interdisciplinary research methods, students will join research teams in a medical school laboratory with the goal of identifying a literary work that explores the social or cultural implications of the lab’s investigations in areas such as breast feeding, cancer research, contagious diseases, vaccine safety, genetic screening, cloning, organ transplants, pain, and sexuality research. Students will learn how grants are developed in the sciences; how multi-disciplinary teamwork occurs in the medical world; and how to generate papers on social, ethical, and cultural issues raised by science and medicine.
Taught by a professor of English, the course will meet in a multimedia seminar room in the Hill Center, allowing us to explore the fundamentals of game design. Students will be required to subscribe to an online game, Lord of the Rings Online, and will compare the interactive story arcs with related narrative forms from literature and film. Readings will range from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring to H. G. Well’s The Time Machine to steampunk fiction, comics, anime, and action film and include critical theory such as Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jesper Juul’s Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, and McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory. Students must have a Windows based computer or Bootcamp already installed on their Mac computers before the first day of class.