Scott Selisker

Interests

Research

Literature and Science, American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Science Fiction, Social Network Analysis, American Studies, Theories of Narrative, Theories of the Novel, Sociology of Literature

Teaching

American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Science Fiction, Medical Humanities, Digital Humanities, Digital Media and Culture

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Selisker, S. (2016). Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapters

• Selisker, S. (2021). Sociology. In Ralph Ellison in Context(pp 270-279). Cambridge University Press.
• Selisker, S. (2020). Behaviorism and Literary Culture. In Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Science, 20th Century(pp 117-127). New York: Palgrave McMillan.
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  This essay traces two strands of behaviorist psychology’s influence on literature, primarily in Anglo-American twentieth-century contexts. In the first, notable literary modernists, the new criticism, andliterary theory have contended with the methodological constraints of psychological and philosophicalbehaviorism. In the second strand, science fiction authors have used novums based on behavioral control toexplore the dystopian potentials of technocracy and totalitarian modes of governance. While the latterstrand has largely been subject to camp treatment in the twenty-first century, many of the political andphilosophical questions related to behaviorism also appear in literary treatments of robotics and artificialintelligence.
• Selisker, S. (2019). Digitization. In Critical Terms for Futures Studies(pp 95-99). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
• Selisker, S. (2017). Social Networks. In American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010(pp 211-223). New York: Cambridge University Press. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316569290
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  Invited contribution to Cambridge Press volume on contemporary literature
• Selisker, S. (2016). Digital Humanities Knowledge: Reflections on the Introductory Graduate Syllabus. In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016(pp 194–201). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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  An 1800-word short essay that began as a post on my personal blog, and was then anonymously nominated and accepted by the editors as deserving to be “highlight[ed as one of the] conversations that have influenced the field during the given year," in a volume envisioned as a definitive compilation for the year's work in the field.

Journals/Publications

• Selisker, S. (2019). Automation and Creativity. ASAP/Journal, 4(2), 312-3.
• Selisker, S. (2019). Neo-Passing: Performing Identity after Jim Crow. AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW, 52(4), 409-410.
• Selisker, S. (2018). The Novel and WikiLeaks: Transparency and the Social Life of Privacy. AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY, 30(4), 756-776.
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  This essay proposes a shift away from thinking about privacy, in fiction and the world, as concerned with an individual’s interior, toward thinking about it as something that inheres in interpersonal and group interactions. This view of privacy becomes especially visible as both a formal feature and a thematic concern in recent novels that take up WikiLeaks as a topic. These novels—Dave Eggers’s The Circle (2013) and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity (2015)—make revealing attempts to square the competing ideals of governmental transparency and individual privacy. By borrowing from social network analysis, and attending to the ways that these authors describe information flow between characters, this essay describes privacy as a facet of our social and information networks.
• Selisker, S. (2015). "Stutter-Stop Flash-Bulb Strange": GMOs and the Aesthetics of Scale in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. Science Fiction Studies, 42, 500–18.
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  ABSTRACTThis article raises questions about the aesthetics of scale as they appear relative to genetically modified organisms in science fiction and especially in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009). Bacigalupi makes the unusual choice of representing GMOs largely through science-fictional tropes of automatism rather than the grotesque. Because of this choice, The Windup Girl inventively enables readers to relate to the very small spatial scales and the long temporal scales at which the genome and its effects are most visible. The article suggests that science fiction has particular flexibility with the aesthetics of scale, particularly where technoscientific phenomena have profound consequences that take place at nonhuman scales.
• Selisker, S. (2015). The Bechdel Test and the Social Form of Character Networks. New Literary History, 46(3), 505-523.
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  AbstractThis essay describes the popular Bechdel Test—a measure of women’s dialogue in films—in terms of social network analysis within fictional narrative. It argues that this form of vernacular criticism arrives at a productive convergence with contemporary academic critical methodologies in surface and postcritical reading practices, on the one hand, and digital humanities, on the other. The data-oriented character of the Bechdel Test, which a text rigidly passes or fails, stands in sharp contrast to identification- or recognition-based evaluations of a text’s feminist orientation, particularly because the former does not prescribe the content, but merely the social form, of women’s agency. This essay connects the Bechdel Test and a lineage of feminist and early queer theory to current work on social network analysis within literary texts, and it argues that the Bechdel Test offers the beginnings of a measured approach to understanding agency within actor networks.
• Selisker, S. (2014). The Cult and the World System: The Topoi of David Mitchell's Global Novels. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 47(3), 443–59.
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  AbstractThis article describes how the novelist David Mitchell employs the “topos of the cult,” a set of conventions that describe a mental state of unfreedom, in the novels Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004). This figuration of an unfree form of society—characterized by a group's specialized language, closed social spaces, and charismatic leadership—has its origins in antitotalitarian political science, fiction, sociology, and psychology. Mitchell and Haruki Murakami (discussed briefly) both question how this Cold War legacy has shaped our understandings of individual agency, and both novelists employ the conventions in characters who understand the world as a simple, single totality. For both writers, the cult serves to draw a contrast with the novels' own self-consciously complex cognitive maps of the contemporary world system.
• Selisker, S. (2011). "Simply by Reacting?": The Sociology of Race and Invisible Man's Automata. AMERICAN LITERATURE, 83(3), 571-596.

Presentations

• Selisker, S. (2022, Feb). Brokerage and Betweenness: The Case of Nella Larsen. Graphs and Networks in the HUmanities 2022. Amsterdam/Online: Huygens Institute Amsterdam, U of Mainz, U of Leipzig, U Ca'Foscari Venice.
• Selisker, S. (2022, Summer). The Agency of Brokerage: Reading Positioning and Power. Digital Humanities 2022. Tokyo/Zoom: ADHO.
• Selisker, S. (2021, November). • [Cancelled due to COVID:] “Raymond Chandler’s Networks and Entangled Agency,” Network Ecologies Panel,. Modernist Studies Association. Chicago: Modernist Studies Association.
• Selisker, S. (2021, October). “Patricia Lockwood, Virality, and the Networking Millennial,” Millennial Fictions Seminar,. Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present 2021. Zoooom: Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
• Selisker, S. (2018, Fall). Privacy in Passing. Modernist Studies Association. Columbus, OH: Modernist Studies Association.
• Selisker, S. (2017, August). "Brainwashing: The Story of an Idea". Arizona Senior Academy. Arizona Senior Academy: Arizona Senior Academy.
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  Public presentation for a senior community.
• Selisker, S. (2017, January). "Feelings of Structure" Roundtable. Modern Language Association. Philadelphia: Modern Language Association.
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  Roundtable on affect and recent turns toward infrastructure in literary studies
• Selisker, S. (2017, March). "Brainwashing, Automation, and Politics". Tucson Festival of Books. Tucson: Tucson Festival of Books.
• Selisker, S. (2017, March). “Leak Fiction: Privacy and the Character Network”. UC Berkeley New Work in C20-21 Literature Workshop. UC Berkeley: UC Berkeley English Dept.
• Selisker, S. (2017, March). “Tracing Global Networks: Protocol, Collectivity, and Yamashita’s I Hotel“. Global/Contemporary Symposium at UVA. University of Virginia: UVA Institute for Humanities and Global Culture.
• Selisker, S. (2017, October). “Institution, Network, Game: Dynamics of the Sellout”. Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Oakland/UC Berkeley: ASAP.
• Selisker, S. (2016, April). "Self and Other, Human and Posthuman: Dialectics of the American Brainwashing Discourse". Dialogical Imaginations. Eichstätt: Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany.
• Selisker, S. (2016, April). Brokering the Self: Agency and Privacy in Character Networks. Scaling Forms Symposium. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.
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  Invited presentation in interdisciplinary symposium including scholars of literature, international relations, and sociology.
• Selisker, S. (2016, December). "Character Networks and the Image of Privacy". New Work in Novel Studies Symposium. Cambridge, MA: Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.
• Selisker, S. (2016, January). Tracing 1984's Networks. Modern Language Association. Austin, TX: Special Session, "Literary and Scientific Networks".
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  (Conference presentation given and subsequently posted on personal webpage.)
• Selisker, S. (2014, Fall). Systems Ecology and Human Automatism in Upstream Color. Society for Literature Science and the Arts Annual Meeting. Dallas, TX: Society for Literature Science and the Arts.
• Selisker, S. (2014, Spring). After Antipsychiatry: Expertise and Pathology in Showtime's Homeland. American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting. New York, NY: American Comparative Literature Association.
• Selisker, S. (2014, Spring). Bipolar Disorder and PTSD: Sympathetic Pathologies in Showtime's Homeland. Humanities Medicine and Wellness Interdisciplinary Conference. University of Arizona: College of Humanities.
• Selisker, S. (2014, Spring). Literary Evidence and Latour's Modes of Existence. Modern Language Association. Chicago, IL: Modern Language Association.
• Selisker, S. (2014, Spring). Network Data and the Bechdel Test. Modern Language Association, Methods of Literary Research Division Panel. Chicago, IL: Modern Language Association.
• Selisker, S. (2014, Summer). Anti-Institutional Automata. New England Americanist Collective/Post-45 2014 Colloquium. Brown University: Post-45, Brown University.
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  Invitational junior faculty and graduate student workshop for contemporary Americanists.

Reviews

• Selisker, S. (2020. Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era, by Justus Nieland(pp np). New York.
• Selisker, S. (2018. Discognition, by Stephen Shaviro(pp 505-9). Science Fiction Film and Television.
• Selisker, S. (2018. It Me: On Merve Emre's The Personality Brokers(pp n.p.). Los Angeles Review of Books.
• Selisker, S. (2017. Culture Machines: On Ed Finn's What Algorithms Want(pp n.p.). Los Angeles Review of Books.
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  Review of Ed Finn, What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (MIT Press, 2017)
• Selisker, S. (2016. Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People.(pp 695-700).
• Selisker, S. (2015. Political Fictions, Post-45(pp 281-285).
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  Review of Michael Szalay, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, and Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State, published in NOVEL: A FORUM ON FICTION

Others

• Selisker, S. (2014, February). Sprint Beyond the Book volume 2: The Future of the Book as a Knowledge System. ASU Center for Science and the Imagination. http://sprintbeyondthebook.com/2014/05/beyond-the-book-knowledge-systems-draft/
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  Invitational conference/book-sprint where about 30 online publishing innovators, literary scholars, and administrators gathered to brainstorm about futures of the book.
• Selisker, S. (2014, January). Literary Data and the Bechdel Test. Stanford Arcade Colloquy: What is Data in Literary Studies?. http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/literary-data-and-bechdel-test
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  Proceedings of MLA 2014 division panel on Methodology in Literary Studies published in scholarly outreach forum at Stanford.