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Textual Afterlives

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Students in GEOL107 generated a series of “soundscape afterlives” in which they collected and visualized data related to how energy sources and their extraction can be found in the sounds around us.

Similarly, this project asks: How do these afterlives manifest in art? If coal, oil, and nuclear energy are indeed inextricably linked to our everyday lives, then they must also appear in cultural artifacts, even those that aren’t explicitly about energy. They exist in the texts and objects we create even if we don’t consciously register their presence.

In this exercise, students collected and visualized data related to energy’s afterlives in art. It is an experiment in seeing how deep and wide these connections go, how they inform our imagination, and how energy generates art in content and form.

Contents of this path:

  1. An Emo-scape of Jhumpa Lahiri's "A Temporary Matter"
  2. "A View of the Woods" Sees Nature and Industrialism Clash
  3. "The City Born Great"
  4. A Perfect Day for Bananafish-- J.D. Salinger
  5. Electric Love: Energy and Non-Energy Similes Compared to Jack and Ennis’s Relationship in Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”
  6. "Then Later, His Ghost" By Sarah Hall
  7. Textual Afterlives in "The Judgment" by Franz Kafka
  8. The Textual Afterlives of Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt”
  9. Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian (b. 1982)
  10. "To Reach Japan"
  11. "The Swimmer"
  12. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge Luis Borges
  13. An Analysis of Piter FM (2006)