Dynamic Subspace

Author: Jason W. Ellis

  • Decoding the Origins of the Tank and “The Land Ironclads”: Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton and H. G. Wells

    I just sent off my presentation proposal for SLSA 2009, which as the theme “Decodings” and will be in Atlanta, Georgia in November.  Since I’ll be teaching and reading for my PhD exams, I decided to dust off a publishable paper to shorten and present at the conference (assuming it’s accepted).  In the meantime, I think I’m going to send this essay out to a journal over the Summer to see if they are interested in publishing it as it is or with minor revision.  Here’s my abstract to SLSA:

    Decoding the Origins of the Tank and “The Land Ironclads”: Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton and H. G. Wells

    Jason W. Ellis

    The first popular, and widely cited, fictional account of the military tank is H.G. Wells’ 1903 short story, “The Land Ironclads.”  The recognized and widely circulated literary publication, the Strand Magazine published Wells’ short story in 1903–thirteen years before the British tank was unveiled to the world at Flers and Courcelette on 15 September 1916 during the First World War’s Battle of the Somme.  However, Wells was not involved in the actual development of the tank, but many historians point to Major-General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton as the single person most responsible for convincing the British military to design and commit invaluable war time resources to its development and utilization in the Great War.  Interestingly, these two persons–Wells and Swinton–developed a public debate in print and other media, which eventually led to Swinton’s libel suit against Wells, over who was most responsible for the invention of the tank.  It is the purpose of this presentation to highlight their public debate, and uncover how the public reacted to these men’s claims.  From this very public argument it will be possible to decode the meaning of such claims to invention, and the early history of Science Fiction, which was in part buttressed on imaginative futurology. 

  • Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” and Chris Columbus’ Bicentennial Man

    Late last night, I finished revising my Bicentennial Man entry for Peter Wright’s The Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations (to be published by Liverpool University Press).  It was a real joy to dive back into Asimov’s work, because it was through his work that I precariously began my trip into SF scholarship with my presentation on dualism in robot narratives for Georgia Tech’s Monstrous Bodies Symposium.

    Having just completed Professor Babacar M’Baye’s African-American Literature course, I was able to engage Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” with the history and stories of the African-American experience that were fresh on my mind.  I have known for a long time that Asimov’s robots are an allegory for African-Americans, but it was on re-reading “The Bicentennial Man” that I realized how much Asimov’s earlier robot writing culminated in this later robot story, first published in 1976–two and three decades after his much loved early robot stories such as “Runaround” and the R. Daneel Olivaw/ Elijah Bailey detective stories.  In fact, I found that “The Bicentennial Man” mirrors the basic structure of American slave narratives, which I go into more detail on in my entry for the collection on film adaptations.

    With this rich source material, I was at first resistant to spoiling it by watching the abysmal film adaptation Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus and starring Robin Williams.  However, I discovered that for as bad as the film is, there are subtle gestures toward the spirit of the source material.  Unfortunately, the film overall pulls the rug out from under the main character’s efforts and successes by erasing the anxiety and hardship Andrew encountered in Asimov’s original story.  I don’t believe the audience understands Andrew’s predicament in the film in the same way that Asimov demonstrates Andrew’s precarious situation in the novelette.  Nevertheless, the film does have some redemptive elements, which are more fully explored in my entry for the collection.  

    When I have more information about the publication of the critical companion, I will post it to dynamicsubspace.net.

  • Terminator Salvation and Battlestar Galactica

    I spent part of today catching up the last part of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, and I saw Terminator Salvation this evening with Y.  I learned in BSG today that the Thirteenth Tribe were actually Cylons–skeletons, bodies, and all. In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright is constructed in the other direction than Terminator 3’s Terminatrix–Marcus is the fusion of man and machine.  However, Marcus was once a murderer–the unconscionable, monstrous, the inhuman.  Given his second chance, he becomes human, or at least what we may consider the human ideal–altruistic, helpful, and self-sacrificing.  Thus, the machine makes the man more human.  However, throughout Terminator Salvation and BSG, I’m reading a shift in the concern about the machinic appropriation of the human.  In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Terminator and T2 films, and older SF, the fear was only about the surface, about the appearance of human mapped or stretched over a cold, metallic infrastructure.  Now, it seems like the concern has more to do with organs and the organic.  Where does this anxiety over our bodies and the tissues that make them work and function come from?  Obviously, the fear of losing human-ness to the machine is rooted in the emergence and subsequent evolution of anxieties following the integration of humans into the great machine and system of the Industrial Revolution.  Perhaps following the turn of the century into the 2000s, the organic (i.e., genetics) meshes with the machine (i.e., AI representing the networked/computerized landscape of the now).  What this might mean for future SF and our engagement with organic and machinic technologies I do not know.  However, I am eager to discover where this future might lead.

  • Kant Quotes Virgil

    As I’ve been reading Kant’s works related to cosmopolitanism, I’ve ran into a lot of Latin quotations.  This is the one that I like the best:

    Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.

    Do not yield to misfortunes, but go and face them more boldly.

    Virgil, Aeneid 6.96 (qtd. in the collection of Immanuel Kant’s writing titled Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History).

  • Rebecca Wilson Lundin’s “Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy”

    At tomorrow’s Blogging Brown Bag discussion organized by Kent State University’s Office of Digital Composition, we’re going to discuss Rebecca Wilson Lundin’s “Teaching with Wikis: Toward a Networked Pedagogy” from Computers and Composition 25 (2008) 432-448.  I thought I would post some of my thoughts here before our meeting in the Satterfield Reading Room tomorrow.

    Lundin’s article is a great introduction to educators about the potential and promise of using wikis in the composition classroom.  In fact, I was jazzed about one day using a wiki in my own classes in the future after reading her essay.  I may be somewhat biased in my eagerness to use wikis in the classroom, because I am a contributor to Wikipedia, and I know how to install MediaWiki on a Mac OS X box.  However, I think that Lundin makes some persuasive points about the power of wikis in the composition classroom, so let me go into some of those in more detail.

    She begins by talking about a networked pedagogy (I’m thinking Foucault’s biopolitics) comprised of “writing as a networked activity,” and “teaching as a networked activity” (432).  These ideas of shared, distributed, and interconnected means of learning and teaching should be facilitated by technologies that reinforce those network oriented goals, such as wikis.

    Wikis are excellent examples of a collaborative writing and composing technology that obviously engages network culture, come close to embodying the original vision of hypertext, and the unique features of wikis including editability and page histories reinforce compositional goals of revision and collaboration.

    Lundin’s essay emphasizes how wikis challenge assumptions about the traditional composition classroom (i.e., individual authorship, workshopping papers, teacher facilitated discussion, etc.).  She demonstrates that wikis challenge these assumptions in four key ways:  

    1) New media composition in a wiki requires little if any expertise beyond the use of a word processor and the open design of wikis promise to unbound student creativity and expression by embracing multimodality.  

    2) Collaborative writing made possible by wikis breaks down the single author paradigm by allowing all wiki participants to write, edit, and comment on any wiki pages including those of other students and those created by the teacher.  Furthermore, the transparency, as Carr et. al. describe it, of wikis through page histories facilitates reflection on the individual’s writing as well as the group collaborative process.

    3) Critical interaction by a real audience of a student’s peers along withfeedback from the teacher should enable a more authentic engagement of students’ work.  Instead of writing for the teacher, students will write for one another, and give criticism to one another.  I think that this aspect holds a lot of promise, but as Lundin admits this is one of the more difficult aspects to engage students with when she discusses her creation of a “class of lurkers” (441). Additionally, she notes problems with flame wars between students.  This part of her essay particularly intreged me, due to my own work on trolls and flame wars in academic discussion lists.

    4) Online authority, particularly on wikis, is decentralized and virtually anonymous.  Instead of merely subverting authority, Lundin makes a valid argument that instead authority in the traditional teacher-student sense is complicated by wiki work.  This could serve to undermine what power the teacher may hold over the classroom dialog and guiding of student work, but the very nature of wikis does empower all users, teacher and student alike, through page histories and what Will Richardson calls soft security, or participant policing of the wiki.  Additionally, student anonymity could help some students contribute in writing through the wiki when they are hesitant to contribute verbally in the classroom.

    Concluding, she indicates that wikis, through their social and networked interaction, promote student social context awareness, because despite the appearance of anonymity, they are engaging one another as social writers.

    I find Lundin’s essay compelling, and I plan on considering ways in which I can implement wikis in future classes.  I like how wikis will make writing regularly so much easier, and most wikis will pragmatically make teacher evaluation of writing easier by selecting to view all contributions by a particular writer/student. As Lundin noted, some teachers would be reticent to have a fully open wiki, and I would fall into this category as well for the simple fact that it might be better for all parties concerned not to allow for too much tomfoolery.  However, a little tomfoolery might be a good thing, and turn into a teachable moment.  I will have to think more on this point as I figure out how to design my class around a wiki/network paradigm.  Also, I am concerned about the flame war aspect of online communication for the composition classroom.  This will inevitably happen, and my primary concern is potential alienation of some students as a result of one or some students non-reflective acts.  Again, this is something that I will have to think further about.  

    If you are a teacher, I definitely recommend you find this article (details listed above), and read it–my notes do not do it justice!