Event ( Fall 2005):

Larry McCaffery:
"The Coevolution of SF, the Avant Garde, & Avant Pop"

Tuesday, October 26 / 4 PM / Cowell Conference Room

Focusing on developments in science fiction during the past twenty years, this talk will explore interactions between science fiction and the avant garde. These supposed life-long enemies co-evolved, so that by the early 1980s they existed in a relationship characterized by a rapid relay of information, stylistic tendencies, narrative archetypes, and character representations. These interactions have produced some of the most culturally significant art of our times. Works to be discussed include William Burroughs’s Nova Express, William Gibson’s early cyberpunk novels, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Laurie Anderson’s "Big Science," and Sonic Youth’s "Daydream Nation."

Larry McCaffery, Professor of English at San Diego State University, has published widely on science fiction, the avant garde, and avant pop. He is the editor of the groundbreaking Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke, 1991), After Yesterday’s Crash: The Avant Pop Anthology (Penguin, 1995), and a couples of books of inteviews with SF and mainstream writers such as Across the Wounded Galaxies (1990) and Some Other Frequency (1996). He is also co-editor, with Ronald Sukenick, of Fiction Collective Two’s Black Ice Books. He was assigned as a judge of the 2001 the Electronic Literature Organization Award.

His more recent works is Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (with Michael Hemmingson and William T. Vollmann, 2003). His more recent "obsession" is with Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.

Sponsored by the Science Fiction Research Cluster