BTK Vendége | Prof. Naomi Mandel előadása: Lights! Camera! Computer! Filming the Digital Revolution

Prof. Naomi Mandel

Abstract:

Clearly, computer games have much to teach us about our digitized, technologized reality. How might these lessons be applied beyond the medium? Could the kind of information and attention elicited by videogames productively inform narrative fiction? What might the novel reader learn from the Grand Theft Auto player, and vice versa? This talk engages with these questions, reflecting on what videogame theory has to offer literary studies. Focusing on Suzanne Collins’ YA trilogy The Hunger Games, the lecture examines how the novels draw on elements unique to the video game medium to articulate the narrative’s political and ethical stakes.

Naomi Mandel is Ann and Joseph Edelman Chair of American Studies at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She was Professor of English and Film/Media at the University of Rhode Island before joining the faculty at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on contemporary literature and critical theory, with special interests in how literature and film work together with current events and popular culture to articulate the terms by which reality is perceived. Mandel has published on the Holocaust, American Slavery, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, online activism, hacking, and the contemporary extreme. She is the author of Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (University of Virginia Press, 2006) and Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X (Ohio State UP, 2015), and has published three volumes of edited essays, including Bret Easton Ellis (Continuum, 2010) and Novels of the Contemporary Extreme (co-edited with Alain-Philippe Durand; Continuum, 2006). Mandel’s current research, which focuses on the visual and literary culture of the digital revolution and the Information Age, has been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal, and electronic book review.