Posts Tagged ‘mass markets’
new book series: MASS MARKETS: STUDIES IN FRANCHISE FICTION
Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures (University of Minnesota Press)
Series editors: Gerry Canavan (Marquette University) and Benjamin J. Robertson (University of Colorado Boulder)
contact: gerrycanavan@gmail.com
Mission Statement
“90% of everything is crap.” —Theodore Sturgeon
Sturgeon’s Law suggests that the bulk of cultural production is not worthy of our attention, except perhaps as a guilty pleasure. However, as popular media storyworlds increasingly dominate the global entertainment landscape, they call out for serious criticism. The “Mass Markets” of our series title refers both to the audiences who consume media franchises and immerse themselves in those storyworlds and to one of the key media forms through which this consumption has taken place, the mass market paperback. This series thus investigates an archive traditional scholarship typically ignores—from video game franchises to longstanding comic storylines, from fantasy trilogies to Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood blockbusters—even as it expands that archive to include cultural productions by marginalized auteurs and from the world beyond North America and Europe. These studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most visible cultural texts are written for critics and fans interested in thinking through the joys and problems mass markets and their fandoms create.
Mass Markets books are 40,000 – 60,000 words each, focused on storyworlds developed in specific franchises and dedicated to expanding our understanding of what franchises can be and who can create and study them. Briefly put, Mass Markets: Studies in Franchise Cultures takes up popular narratives (from books and film to television, games, comics, and beyond) that:
- are produced and distributed across relatively long timescales;
- extend across multiple media (including film, television, streaming services, video games, books, comics, and, in certain cases, toys and other commodities);
- generate extensive narrative storyworlds, both textually and through paratexts like maps, glossaries, indexes, and digital extensions like authorized encyclopedias and fan wikis;
- have been produced by multiple writers, pen names, and work-for-hire journeymen rather than in accordance with elite notions of “authors” or “auteurs”;
- are often governed more by a top-down corporate vision than aesthetic and political considerations;
- and are created for large, mainstream audiences (although they may also contain Easter eggs and others sorts of fan service directed to longstanding fans of the franchise or the genre more generally).
The series aims not to produce full or complete histories of various franchises: their dates of inception, long lists of their various texts and descriptions of the relations among them, the economics and studio maneuvering behind their productions, and so on. Such nondiegetic history is necessary to the series, and we expect the individual texts that make up the series to situate the storyworlds they address in larger cultural movements and historical moments. However, the series shall focus on the diegetic natures of the worlds themselves created by franchises that wish to leverage those worlds into a sustainable condition for storytelling and profit, as well as on the varieties of reception and audience participation such worlds produce.
We therefore envision books on Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the Star Wars Universe, The Walking Dead’s ruined post-zombie America, Marvel’s Wakanda, Harry Potter’s Hogwarts, The Broken Earth’s the Stillness, Tin-Tin’s Africa, Akira’s Neo-Tokyo, Valérian and Laurelin’s City of a Thousand Planets, the stylized India of Bollywood film series such as Dhoom or Raaz, Full Metal Alchemist’s Amestris, and so on. But the storyworld we are most excited about is the one we haven’t thought of yet.
Interested authors should contact us for more information and consultation prior to writing anything, but we include the elements of a Minnesota book review for reference.
Elements of a Book Prospectus (University of Minnesota Press)
1. Overview of the book, including
• a summary of the book’s main substantive contribution(s)
• an explanation of the theoretical framework that you employ
• a description of the methodological approach(es) that you employ
• a comparison of the book to others in the field, as well as an explanation of the unique contribution that this work makes (i.e., xdescribe other books and how, specifically, your differs from them)
• a description of the target audience(s) for the book.
2. Table of contents and chapter-by-chapter descriptions (one page per chapter describing its relationship to the other chapters and to the overall argument of the book)
3. Sample chapter(s), preferably including the introduction and at least two substantive chapters
4. Current curriculum vitae (if the book is a collection of essays, include a list of contributors’ affiliations)
5. Manuscript specifics, including estimated length, delivery date, electronic format, and any special requirements (e.g., artwork, tables, photographs, film stills)
So I Had A Lot of Tabs Open Links
* There’s a kind of “deleted scene” from my book out in the new issue of Women’s Studies: “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” It’s in the second half of a special double-issue devoted to Butler, edited by Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey.
* I’ll be presenting a little bit of my research at the conference this weekend held by Marquette’s Center for the Advancement of the Humanities. Check it out!
* Thanks to everyone who helped me run ideas for my theory class next semester. Here’s what I went with.
* I really liked The Wandering Earth and I think you should see it in a theater — but if you must see it on Netflix I understand. The Chinese Sci-Fi Epic The Wandering Earth Could Be a Glimpse at the Future of the Blockbuster. And while we’re talking: How Chinese novelists are reimagining science fiction.
* CFP: Special Issue: “Surveilling the Body: Ableism and Anglophone Literature.”
* CFP: Science Fiction and Religion.
* CFP: Contemporary American Science Fiction Film: The Bush, Obama and Trump Years.
* Deadline getting close for SFRA 2019 in Hawai’i.
* Marcus Center announces 2019 dates for ‘Hamilton’ in Milwaukee.
* eSports at Marquette and beyond: The booming popularity of esports has started a vociferous debate over whether the NCAA or another entity will regulate the industry for colleges and universities.
* ‘Now Comes the Hard Part’: 20-Day Strike at Wright State Has Ended.
* Lowbrow Culture and Guilty Pleasures? The Performance and Harm of Academic Elitism.
* Multiple UNC Honor System members, including the Graduate and Professional Court’s chairperson and attorney general, will testify at a public hearing Tuesday as graduate student activist Maya Little appeals sanctions brought against her last year.
* It is worse, much worse, than you think. It is absolutely time to panic about climate change. More David Wallace-Wells via MetaFilter. A new simulation finds that global warming could cause stratocumulus clouds to disappear in as little as a century, which would add 8°C (14°F) of extra warming. We broke down what climate change will do, region by region. This map shows you what your city will feel like in 2080 and boy, are we in for a treat. Want to know what your city will feel like in 2080? Look 500 miles south. Use these tools to help visualize the horror of rising sea levels. The Story Behind the Green New Deal’s Meteoric Rise. 7 Reasons Democrats Won’t Pass a Green New Deal. Democrats are climate deniers. This is an emergency, damn it. Climate signs. Polar bears. Who is the Subject of Climate Change? Insurers Worry a Financial Crisis May Come From Climate Risks. Why the White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized Wild Rice’s Rights. Massive restoration of world’s forests would cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions, analysis suggests. When Islamophobia, inequality, and climate change collide, well, this is How It Can Happen Here. ‘Moment of reckoning’: US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports. And this January was actually one of the warmest on record, polar vortex and all. But don’t worry, they’ve got this.
* How sci-fi could help solve climate change.
* For nearly two decades at the Grand Canyon, tourists, employees, and children on tours passed by three paint buckets stored in the National Park’s museum collection building, unaware that they were being exposed to radiation.
* Chimpanzees ‘talk’ just like humans. It’s time to realise how similar we are. Rethinking animal cognition. Dolphins Seem to Use Toxic Pufferfish to Get High.
* When you don’t try to solve a problem, it doesn’t get solved.
* In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall—including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”
* “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right.
* A deep dive into stadium bathrooms.
* In this exclusive investigative report from Montreal, Maisonneuve exposes the bid-rigging, violence and sabotage at the heart of an unlikely racket: snow removal.
* All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List.
* What happens when a school district votes to arm teachers? A Rust Belt educator takes us through the grim realities of training to kill one of his own students. Teachers with Guns.
* Have you ever wondered what goes on in those school shooter trainings your child’s teacher is required to undergo? Vital, must read thread on the nightmare factory that schools have become.
* A new history reveals that for female slaveholders, the business of human exploitation was just as profitable—and brutal—as it was for men.
* The Rise of the Mega-University.
* U.S. Student Debt in ‘Serious Delinquency’ Tops $166 Billion. Here’s Why So Many Americans Feel Cheated By Their Student Loans. What’s changed about grad school in fifteen years.
* This neuroscientist is fighting sexual harassment in science—but her own job is in peril.
* What is it like to go from a tenured professorship to an hourly wage driving buses? This piece tries to make sense of an unusual transition. An update from Steven Salaita.
* Sean Guynes reviews Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times.
* The Bizarre Planets That Could Be Humanity’s New Homes. What would human civilization look like on a tidally locked world?
* Remember Mars One, that company we all knew was a scam but still kinda hoped was real because of how much we liked the movie The Martian? Yeah, it went bankrupt.
* 11-Year-Old Arrested After Refusing to Stand for Pledge of Allegiance.
* Two years in, some people are still expecting one of his scandals to bring him down. I know better. Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump.
* Elizabeth Warren wants to ban the US from using nuclear weapons first. You’re half right!
* Financial Windfalls: 15 Stories of the Money That Changed Everything.
* Build your own wealth tax: try your hand at taxing the superrich.
* Income inequality is likely worse than before the Great Depression.
* A living wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect.
* Nice work if you can get it.
* When the field gets big, the primaries get weird.
* The Internet is a nightmare from which I am struggling to awake: The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America. A pediatrician exposes suicide tips for children hidden in videos on YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube Kids is just a horror show. The dodgy, vulnerable fame of YouTube’s child ASMR stars. Disney, Fortnite pull YouTube ads amidst concern over a “soft-core pedophile ring” operating in its comments. Apple and Google accused of helping ‘enforce gender apartheid’ by hosting Saudi government app that tracks women and stops them leaving the country. Classroom Technology Is Indoctrinating Students Into A Culture Of Surveillance.
* The past isn’t over, it isn’t even past.
* The United States Is a Progressive Nation With a Democracy Problem.
* State Universities Are Being Resegregated.
* Do Racial Epithets Have Any Place in the Classroom? A Professor’s Suspension Fuels That Debate.
* A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says.
* How neoliberalism normalizes hostility.
* How the United States reinvented empire.
* Pack the court. John Roberts is not your friend.
* Forget Strong Female Characters! We Need Complicated Female Characters Who Screw Up (A Lot).
* The love life of May Parker.
* ‘It’s eating the world’: Inside the Knicks’ and David Fizdale’s battle with ‘Fortnite.’
* Progress in Play: Board Games and the Meaning of History.
* The One Choice You Weren’t Given In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Veale followed the GDPR right of access process to submit his request, and Netflix eventually returned that viewing data through an encrypted email. Veale then posted the results of his request to Twitter for all of us to peruse. The bottom line is that Netflix is recording and storing the choices people make when they watch the episode.
* Is Email Making Professors Stupid? I promise it’s not helping.
* Second, someone get this film made.
* Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
* Guys, Star Trek is CANCELLED.
* Harvard got so rich it’s even going after Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. Shameful.
* Psychology. Douchey robot bosses. Psyops. Political capital. A Brief History of Life Online. Rapunzel.
* And be warned, traveler: Tetris 99 is extremely very good.
Gerry Canavan 