The year's work in nerds, wonks, and neocons

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Title:

Author:

Comentale, Edward P., editor.

ISBN:

9780253026187

9780253026828

Physical Description:

x, 366 pages ; 19 cm.

Series:

The year's work: studies in fan culture and cultural theory

Year's work (Bloomington, Ind.)

General Note:

Source of cataloging data: WCP

Abstract:

What happens when math nerds, band and theater geeks, goths, sci-fi fanatics, Young Republican debate poindexters, techies, Trekkies, D & D players, wallflowers, bookworms, and RPG players grow up? And what can they tell us about the life of the mind in the contemporary United States? With #GamerGate in the national news, shows like The Big Bang Theory on ever-increasing numbers of screens, and Peter Orzsag and Paul Ryan on magazine covers, it is clear that nerds, policy wonks, and neoconservatives play a major role in today's popular culture in America. The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons delves into subcultures of intellectual history to explore their influence on contemporary American intellectual life. Not limiting themselves to describing how individuals are depicted, the authors consider the intellectual endeavors these depictions have come to represent, exploring many models and practices of learnedness, reflection, knowledge production, and opinion in the contemporary world. As teachers, researchers, and university scholars continue to struggle for mainstream visibility, this book illuminates the other forms of intellectual excitement that have emerged alongside them and found ways to survive and even thrive in the face of dismissal or contempt. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Working in and on Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons, This Year and to Come / Through glasses, dorkily. Wonk Masculinity / Surface Worship, Super-Public Intellectuals, and the Suspiciously Common Reader / Stratigraphic Form: Science Fictions of the Present / Obsession, Pathology, and Justice: Nerds, Bodies, Winsor McCay, and the 1893 Chicago Fair / The Neoconservative Imagination

Conservative and Internationalist: George S. Schuyler's Pulp Fiction and the Imperialism of the Oppressed / The Turing Test and Other Love Songs / Nature, nurture, nerd: ways of being. Sex and the Single Nerd: The Schizo Saga of Genes, Genius, and Finally Getting Some / Nerds in Capes: Courtly Love and the Erotics of Medievalism / Comic Book Kid / Walking Simulators, #GamerGate, and the Gender of Wandering / The Fan as Public Intellectual in "RaceFail '09" / Autism, Nerds, and Insecurity / Professors without Chairs

Subject Term:

Intellectuals -- United States -- 21st century.

Stereotypes (Social psychology) -- United States -- 21st century.

Added Author:

Comentale, Edward P.,

Jaffe, Aaron,

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Sugar Grove - Todd Library	Book	E169.12 .Y33 2017	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

What happens when math nerds, band and theater geeks, goths, sci-fi fanatics, Young Republican debate poindexters, techies, Trekkies, D&D players, wallflowers, bookworms, and RPG players grow up? And what can they tell us about the life of the mind in the contemporary United States? With #GamerGate in the national news, shows like The Big Bang Theory on ever-increasing numbers of screens, and Peter Orzsag and Paul Ryan on magazine covers, it is clear that nerds, policy wonks, and neoconservatives play a major role in today's popular culture in America. The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons delves into subcultures of intellectual history to explore their influence on contemporary American intellectual life. Not limiting themselves to describing how individuals are depicted, the authors consider the intellectual endeavors these depictions have come to represent, exploring many models and practices of learnedness, reflection, knowledge production, and opinion in the contemporary world. As teachers, researchers, and university scholars continue to struggle for mainstream visibility, this book illuminates the other forms of intellectual excitement that have emerged alongside them and found ways to survive and even thrive in the face of dismissal or contempt.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

Appropriate to its title, this collection is filled with detours, regressions, and asides, delightful and always instructive. Each essay is a work of old-fashioned scholarship, and each is an exploration rather than an attempt to prove a point. The contributors delve, backtrack, then dive in again, exploring backgrounds of American culture leading to a number of current stereotypes. The book is part of a series titled "The Year's Work: Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory," which plays on stodgy academic formulae and allows for freedom of research and thought that eludes too many contemporary academics and that is sorely missed by the curious even far from the ivory towers. The nerds, wonks, and neocons of the title are no joke, but they are the entryway for exploring the broad aspects of the American experience that have been developing for well more than a century. Sometimes, to be effective, studies need to deliberately dismantle previous perceptions and assumptions, or least provoke questions about them. By looking in cultural corners generally avoided, and with the freedom to follow whatever leads they notice, the contributors to this volume show how cultural studies should be conducted in a vast and various society such as the US's. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Aaron John Barlow, New York City College of Technology (CUNY)