SSC Seminar Series: N. Katherine Hayles

Databases, Postindustrial Knowledge Work, and Hall's The Raw Shark Texts

N. Katherine Hayles

2010-11 Brockington Visitor
Duke University

Thursday, October 21, 2010
12:30 - 1:30pm
Kingston Hall Room 201

In discussing databases, Alan Liu makes the point that they conform to the requirements of postindustrial knowledge work, namely that it be transformable, automated, and autonomously mobile. This talk explores the implications of databases for posthuman subjectivity in the context of Steven Hall's novel "The Raw Shark Texts."

N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of science, technology and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in 2002. Her work has been recognized by numerous fellowships and honors, including a Guggenheim, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship, and a University of California Presidential Research Fellowship. She is currently at work on a book entitled How We Think: Transforming Power and Digital Technologies.

N. Katherine Hayles will also be delivering the Brockington Lecture at 5pm, Thursday, Oct 21 in the Robert Sutherland Room 202. For more information, click here:

http://www.sscqueens.org/events/brockington-lecture-n-katherine-hayles

Everyone welcome!