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