DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.

James Harris

Assistant Professor of English

"Pocket-Sized Archives: Classic Consoles, Nostalgia, and Corporate Rememory"

May 9, NL 314, 2-4​​pm

 

The increasing popularity of digital interactive entertainment presents a series of unique challenges, as well as unprecedented opportunities, to reexamine long-held truism about history, nostalgia, and the interplay between the producers and consumers of media. As perhaps the most widely recognized of a new generation of media, videogames have become a useful site for scholars of both technology and culture. In part, this owes much to the early history of videogames, which mirrored that of many other media wherein a lack of corporate interest or generic standardization led to a massive outgrowth of surprising and experimental work. Unintentionally, that lack of concern about future posterity created a situation in which many early examples of the medium could become lost to time, either because of obsolete hardware or lack of circulation.

 

 

This talk considers how the recent trend of “classic” videogame consoles, originally posed as a solution to this problem, emerged as an unexpectedly fraught battleground on which questions about nostalgia, ownership, fandom, and corporate control collide. These miniature consoles, essentially virtual emulators housed inside casings designed to resemble smaller versions of their original and offering a pre-set number of older games, highlight many of the tensions that attend attempts to imagine an archive that is both the product of a multinational corporation and a representation of a specific moment in media world history.

 

James K. Harris received a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio (2010) and an M.A. (2012) and Ph.D. (2017) in English from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. He teaches courses in composition, African American literature and contemporary fiction. Before coming to Bronx Community College, he taught at The Ohio State University and Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His research has primarily focused on 20th Century US Ethnic Literature, and specifically representations of youth, adolescence, and coming of age. His recent work appears in the edited collection Future Humans in Fiction and Film (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2018) and is forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Culture. He is currently developing a project at the intersection of game studies and cultural theory, tentatively titled Play Street.

 

DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.