Guest Lecture Pawel Frelik (University of Warsaw)

"DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN:

Depression, Desperation, and Lost America in Kentucky Route Zero"

Kentucky Route Zero has been praised for its magic realist atmosphere, dreamlike and surreal sensibilities, and beautifully balanced audio and visuals. This point-and-click adventure game is steeped in a number of literary, cinematic, and visual traditions, but they are not the only context in which Kentucky Route Zero can be understood. The game is also a discrete but unmistakably pained reflection on the collapse of small-town America. It sketches the outlines of a larger albeit never clearly resolvable crisis: economic precarity, social desperation, and broken stories. The talk will focus on shedding light on how to “read” KRZ from this perspective and what exactly the game tells us about the contemporary United States. 

Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Leader of the Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include science fiction, video games, fantastic visualities, digital media, and transmedia storytelling. He has published widely in these fields, serves on the boards of Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and is the co-editor of the New Dimensions in Science Fiction book series at the University of Wales Press. In 2013-2014, he was President of the Science Fiction Research Association, the first in the organization's history from outside North America, and now serves as SFRA's Immediate Past President. He is also Science Fiction Division Head of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts and the Chair of the Science Fiction and Technoscience Book Prize at the University of California, Riverside. In 2017, he was the first non-Anglophone recipient of the Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service presented for outstanding service activities: promotion of SF teaching and study, editing, reviewing, editorial writing, publishing, organizing meetings, mentoring, and leadership in SF/fantasy organizations.

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 fully funded by the CIAS and co-organized by the Department of American Studies.

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