Welcome to The Pequod, home on the web of Dr Alistair Brown. I am an early-career academic who teaches and researches English Literature at the Open University and Durham University.
I have published articles and book chapters on postmodernism, cybergothic, and literary representations of science, and I am currently researching the connections between video games and literary narratives.
The Unscience Fiction of China Mi�ville's The City and the City
China Mi�ville's
The City and the City is about two opposing city-states that coexist, not simply side by side but physically overlapping one another. Yet as well as the architectural blurring within the novel, The City and the City also embodies a generic blurring that means the novel relates uncertainly to our own reality.
Luka and the Fire of Life, by Salman Rushdie
Luka and the Fire of Life is a children's fantasy, adopting Rushdie's usual mode of magic realism. However, as a fantasy novel Luka is unconvincing and undramatic, and although the novel has an interesting twist on magic realism as it is set within a computer game, Rushdie misses the opportunity to comment upon virtual culture in an insightful way.
The Veteran
On the bench provided, he sits at the top of the street
On a shopping Saturday, and watches the faces,
And sweaty palms pinned to plastic bags,
Advancing on their burst between glass fronts,
Muddied with the money of modern style
Current Research
I am currently preparing a monograph entitled
Reading Games: Computer Games and the Limits of Literature, which compares canonical literary texts and theories to computer games, with a view to exploring the ways in which each media can cast light upon the other. Linked to this I have articles and book chapters planned on computer games and modernism, serialisation and games, and reading Ulysses as a role playing game.
Tuition Fee and Contact Hours Calculator
One of my discoveries and motivations for constructing this calculator is that there is currently poor information about how tuition fees are spent in supporting teaching - the percentage which contribute towards infrastructure such as library services, versus the percentage of fees which pay for staff contact time. Consequently, one can question how a tuition fee (�3225 for 2009-10) which is pretty much universally charged across different universities and subjects can be fair, given the apparently different costs for supplying different numbers and types of contact hours or infrastructure services across different subjects.
Some of the material on this site is free to reproduce in a non-commercial context, according to the Copyright document. If you do use ideas or work from The Pequod, you are asked to use the correct Citation.
