UC New Media Research Directory
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah
February 2nd, 2007 under Faculty, Uncategorized

Assistant Professor of Communication, UC San Diego
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Noah Wardrip-FruinNoah Wardrip-Fruin, who will join the Communication Department at UC San Diego (appointment pending), is one of the leaders in the field of electronic literature and new media arts. After receiving his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Brown in 2003 and while serving as one of Brown’s Traveling Scholars, he co-edited both The New Media Reader (MIT Press 2003) and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (MIT Pres, 2004), which have been influential in establishing the field of new media studies. Wardrip-Fruin is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. His many collaborative works of electronic literature include Gray Matters, The Impermanence Agent, the installation Talking Cure, and the Cave piece Screen. He is also a founding member of the well-known electronic literature and new media group-blog, Grand Text Auto. Currently, he is co-editing Computer Lib/Dream Machines (MIT Press, forthcoming).


 Links:      Home page | Grand Text Auto

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To explain this more precisely, just as Bloom acknowledges in Omens of Millennium that the very prescience of the Gnostic texts would not have allowed them to disappear entirely (and for their persistence, it must be noted, he is joyful), the prescience of Frankenstein similarly renders it a dangerous text to be used and/or abused. Frankenstein’s prescience resides in Mary Shelley’s brilliant dialectic of reality-based faith and scientific dreams. Simultaneously, this dialectic demands attention and theorization and it denies the possibility of polemical resolution. Thus, Shelley astonishingly narrates a meta-prognostication on the formula of science fiction as the imaginative production which can lead to reproductions inside and outside of texts even as she is installing the spark of life into the first of its species. From this critical perspective, even the most conservative efforts to ossify Frankenstein into a technophobic cultural cliché will, like Victor’s pastoral optimism in trying to forget about the creature amidst the sublime Alpine landscape, not succeed in bringing forth the good spirits (whether God or a sacred “Nature”) they summon. Rather, every cautionary invocation of Frankenstein cannot help but give more life, as both Harold Bloom and that rebellious replicant Roy Baty are both fond of saying, to precisely the abhorrent productions and reproductions they desperately wish to kill.
From “Dismembering the Cautionary Cliché: Re-reading the Warnings in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”
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