Coming Soon: Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity

Coming Soon from Lexington Books:

Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity

M J CLARKE

Lexington Books

Pages: 150 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-7936-3603-4 • Hardback • July 2022 • $95.00 • (£73.00)

978-1-7936-3604-1 • eBook • June 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Further details and ordering at https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793636034/Dragon's-Lair-and-the-Fantasy-of-Interactivity.

Perhaps no arcade game is so nostalgically remembered, yet so critically bemoaned, as Dragon’s Lair. A bit of a technological neanderthal, the game implemented a unique combination of videogame components and home video replay, garnering great popular media and user attention in a moment of contracted economic returns and popularity for the videogame arcade business. But subsequently, writers and critics have cast the game aside as a cautionary tale of bad game design. In Dragon’s Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity, MJ Clarke revives Dragon’s Lair as a fascinating textual experiment interlaced with powerful industrial strategies, institutional discourse, and textual desires around key notions of interactivity and fantasy. Constructing a multifaceted historical study of the game that considers its design, its makers, its recording medium, and its in-game imagery, Clarke suggests that the more appropriate metaphor for Dragon’s Lair is not that of a neanderthal, but a socio-technical network, infusing and advancing debates about the production and consumption of new screen technologies. Far from being the gaming failure posited by evolutionary-minded lay critics, Clarke argues, Dragon’s Lair offers a fascinating provisional solution to still-unsettled questions about screen media.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Dragon's Lair: The Hardware

Chapter 2: Dragon's Lair: The Business

Chapter 3: Dragon's Lair: The Disc

Chapter 4: Dragon's Lair: The Fantasy

References

About the Author

Author Information:

MJ Clarke is associate professor in TV, film, and media studies at California State University, Los Angeles.

Recent Book: Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

Shakespeare’s Serial Returns in Complex TV

Authors:  Christina Wald

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

Available in hardcover and as an ebook

Full details at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-46851-4

Traces Shakespearean influences on, and engagements in, contemporary TV series

Demonstrates how the serial complexity of current TV shows helps us understand the dramaturgical serialisations in Shakespeare’s plays

Discusses a range of adaptational strategies that range from deliberate rewritings to ‘non-adaptations' (i.e. to unintentional returns of Shakespearean plots, characters, and motifs)

Part of the book series: Reproducing Shakespeare (RESH)

About this book

This book examines how Shakespeare’s plays resurface in current complex TV series. Its four case studies bring together The Tempest and the science fiction-Western Westworld, King Lear and the satirical dynastic drama of Succession, Hamlet and the legal thriller Black Earth Rising, as well as Coriolanus and the political thriller Homeland. The comparative readings ask what new insights the twenty-first-century remediations may grant us into Shakespeare’s texts and, vice versa, how Shakespearean returns help us understand topical concerns negotiated in the series, such as artificial intelligence, the safeguarding of democracy, terrorism, and postcolonial justice. This study also proposes that the dramaturgical seriality typical of complex TV allows insights into the seriality Shakespeare employed in structuring his plays. Discussing a broad spectrum of adaptational constellations and establishing key characteristics of the new adaptational aggregate of serial Shakespeare, it seeks to initiate a dialogue between Shakespeare studies, adaptation studies, and TV studies.

CFP Disney and the Middle Ages collection (7/15/2022)

Apologies for cross-posting;

Disney and the Middle Ages

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2022/06/06/disney-and-the-middle-ages

deadline for submissions:
July 15, 2022

full name / name of organization:
Christina M. Carlson, Mariah L. Cooper, and Joshua Parks

contact email:
disneymedievalvolume@gmail.com



Call for Papers

Edited Volume on Disney and the Middle Ages



We invite proposals for an edited collection of essays on medievalism in Disney media for Brepols’ new series Reinterpreting the Middle Ages: From Medieval to Neo. The Walt Disney Company's films, theme parks, and merchandise are full of people, places, and things coded as “medieval,” and because Disney's medievalism is often coded as white and Christian, it is especially relevant to medieval studies' ongoing struggle with white supremacy within and outside the field.



We encourage authors to consider the role of the Walt Disney Company in shaping popular perceptions of the Middle Ages, as well as the function of medievalism in Disney’s ideological projects. How does Disney’s medievalist media represent gender, race, religion, disability, and other features of medieval life? What do those representations reveal about modern life as seen and shaped by Disney?



We welcome submissions from a wide variety of disciplines including literary studies, history, religious studies, gender studies, musicology, art history, and film studies. Critical perspectives such as ecocriticism, animal studies, queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, material culture, and postcolonial theory are also encouraged. In addition, we welcome submissions from non-medievalist scholars with expertise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century media and culture.



Proposals of 300 to 500 words should be submitted by email to disneymedievalvolume@gmail.com by Friday July 15, 2022. We aim to notify authors about accepted submissions by September 1, 2022. We have been invited to submit this collection for publication in Brepols’ new series Reinterpreting the Middle Ages: From Medieval to Neo.



Please write to the above email address with any questions, or contact Christina M. Carlson (cmcarlson@iona.edu), Mariah Cooper (mlcooper@mun.ca), and/or Joshua Parks (joshua.t.parks@gmail.com).


We look forward to hearing from you.




Last updated June 7, 2022
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