Overwhelmed and Underworked: Inherent Vice, Aproductivity, and Narrative

This thesis proposes an artistic mode called aproductivity, which arises with the secular crisis of capitalism in the early 1970’s. It reads aproductivity as the aesthetic reification of Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, a peculiar form of philosophy that refuses to move forward, instead producing dialectics without synthesis. The first chapter examines the economic history aproductivity grows out of, as well as its relation to Francis Fukuyama’s concept of “The End of History.” After doing so, the chapter explores negative dialectics and aproductivity in relation to Adam Phillips’ concept of the transformational object. In the second chapter, the thesis looks at the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice (2009), as well as the 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson adaptation of the same name. It offers a reading of the two as allegories for life under late capitalism, with particular focus on the breakdown of narrative and the search for something that will make sense of a world where the logics of capitalism no longer function correctly

More than a game: The computer game as fictional form

Whether you love them or loathe them, look back with wistful nostalgia to the days of Pong and Space Invaders, or regard the whole phenomenon with blank incomprehension, there is no doubt that computer and video games now occupy a significant place in contemporary popular culture. The economics alone are staggering, with unit sales counted in the millions. The frequency of assertions in the popular press about the dangerous influence of their violent subject matter and 'immersive' potential imply a startling level of influence. To disregard the computer game is to refuse to engage fully with contemporary popular culture. This is the first academic work dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. Taking its cue from practices of reading texts in literary and cultural studies, it considers the computer game as a new and emerging mode of contemporary storytelling in a fashion that is accessible and readable, recognising the excitement and pleasure that has made the computer game such a massive global phenomenon. In a carefully organised study Barry Atkins discusses in detail questions of narrative and realism in four of the most significant games of the last decade: Tomb Raider, Half-Life, Close Combat and SimCity. This is a work for both the student of contemporary culture and those game-players who are interested in how computer games tell their stories