Cultural Convergence: or My Nerdity Bears Fruit

I'm back to writing! The long break was for an unusually busy/lazy section of school. Busy inasmuch as I had writing to do, but lazy inasmuch as none of the writing was actually useful or pertinent to my overall scholarly project. Which is a pity considering why I singed up for certain classes...

There are a few points that I'll flesh out from my summer classes though that are definitely relevant to me, though I didn't write about them for class necessarily.

What I did in the last two months was take some summer courses and do a DIS (Directed Individual Study) with my Major Professor (the tenure-track faculty member who is the head of my dissertation committee). While the classes were not entirely fruitful, the DIS was very helpful because I did two important things: finished a first draft of my dissertation prospectus and wrote an annotated bibliography therefore.

My dissertation is basically a reading of Warhammer 40K as a point of cultural convergence: an intellectual space where a single idea is reproduced across many modes and in many forms, but with a recognizable core or canon. The goal of my dissertation is to explore how audiences interact with the cultural producers in manipulating or policing the core of the convergence and whose authority matters most when deciding issues of canonicity. At the same time I'll be making a case for games - as explicitly interactive spaces - being the new mode of cultural reproduction and memory. I'll do that by discussing Warhammer 40K as an obvious retelling of Milton's Paradise Lost and discuss how both those works are links in a longer chain of remediation stretching back through many interpreters to the Bible. This retelling by new speakers, or "remediation," goes hand in hand with my simultaneous discussion of who controls the canon and who makes meaning in the relationship between producers and consumers.

Really, though, the Marxist idea of "Cultural Creators ==> Consumers" may be outmoded inasmuch as the categories of Creators and Consumers are rapidly losing their stability.

Anyway, most of my writing will have something to do with the dissertation ideas I imagine, so my many, many readers have that to look forward to.