Guest Lecture Dan-Hassler Forest (Utrecht University)

"IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN":

Stranger Things, Twin Peaks: The Return, and the Industrial Logic of Nostalgia Culture

The television series Stranger Things and Twin Peaks: The Return, both of which emerged in recent years as widely praised contemporary media properties, illustrate some of the key contradictions of nostalgia and affective labor  in our current media landscape. Both series are richly layered with complex and diverse references to earlier texts, making them particularly suitable for recapping, blogging, mashups, clickbait journalism, and participatory culture. But at the same time, they articulate and even dramatize radically different aspects of media nostalgia. In this lecture, I draw on these two shows and their various paratexts to map out the increasingly powerful dynamic between nostalgia culture and affective labor in the context of ubiquitous media franchising, and the contradictory ways in which it draws on nostalgia as a political category.

The event is free and open to the public.
It takes place in the context of the Conference Worlding SF -
www.worlding-sf.com.

This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies and co-funded by the ERASMUS+ Programm of the European Union.

Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at