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The Pequod
Dr Alistair Brown
Associate lecturer in English Literature; researching video games and literature

New Blog

Twitter @alibrown18

New Essay

Through exploring the psychopathology of Capgras syndrome, in which a patient mistakes a loved one for an imposter, The Echo Maker offers a sustained meditation on the ways in which we project our own problems onto other people. As a reflection on the mysteries of consciousness, the novel offers some interesting if not especially new insights into the fuzzy boundaries between scientific and literary interpretations of the mind. Read more



Welcome

Alistair Brown

Welcome to The Pequod, home on the web of Dr Alistair Brown. I'm an early-career academic teaching within English literary studies, but with a research interest in video games and digital cultures.

As the editor of READ: Research English At Durham and researcher on Creative Fuse North East, I'm also a specialist in engaging arts and humanities research with heritage, culture, public and business.

I have published across fields such as postmodernism, cybergothic, and literary representations of science. My main project at present is the connections between video games and literary narratives.

You can find out more about me here.



What's New

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.


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This page was published on June 15, 2008 | Keywords: pequod, home page, index, welcome

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