Event (Spring, 2005):

Philip Wegner's Talk

Getting Beyond the Cold War’s Closure:
Repetitions and Revisions in the Terminator Films

We re-scheduled the event time in solidarity with the strikers!.
May 26 (Thurs) 7:00 @ Oakes Mural Room

Phillip E. Wegner is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, where he teaches twentieth-century literature, narrative theory, critical theory, and cultural studies. He received his BA from California State University, Northridge (1986) and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University (1993), where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. Professor Wegner is the author of Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (University of California Press, 2002). He has published articles on topics including twentieth-century culture, utopian fiction, literary theory, cultural studies, spatial theory, globalization, contemporary film, and science fiction, in journals such as Cultural Critique, Utopian Studies, The Comparatist, and Rethinking Marxism. Two of his essays were the recipients of the Battisti Award for Best Essay published in a volume of Utopian Studies. His most recent or forthcoming essays include, “Spatial Criticism: Critical Geography, Space, Place, and Textuality,” in Introducing Criticism at the Twenty-First Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh University Press, 2002); “Soldierboys for Peace: Cognitive Mapping, Space, and Science Fiction as World Bank Literature,” in World Bank Literature, ed. Amitava Kumar (University of Minnesota Press, 2002); and “Where the Prospective Horizon is Omitted: Naturalism and Dystopia in Fight Club and Ghost Dog,” in Dark Horizons, eds. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Routledge).

His talk will be entitled "Getting Beyond the Cold War’s Closure: Repetitions and Revisions in the Terminator Films." He writes, “If T2 stages the end of a Cold War and its deterministic logics, and gives expression to the dizzying sense of freedom the United States felt in this moment to impose its will unhindered on the entire globe, then T3 can be said to repeat this gesture, in order to show the constraints and burdens that come with such an unparalleled position. It would be September 11 that would help ‘us’ assume a new global role, thereby marking both the final closure of the world historical situation of the Cold War and the opening of a new period in global history, that of the terrible infinity of the new Empire’s ‘war on terror.’”

This URL is his website.
http://web.english.ufl.edu/faculty/pwegner/index.html

Sponsored by the Science Fiction Research Cluster