Please join us on Friday, October 19, 2018 at 11:00 AM in Cobb 311 for the next meeting of the Mass Culture Workshop. We are delighted to have Steven Maye, PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago. He will be presenting an article in-progress titled “The Cold Cold Open: Residues of Container Shipping in The X-Files and Later Television Dramas.”
Steven’s paper is available for download here.
Please email either Gary [gkafer@uchicago.edu] or Cooper [cooperlong@uchicago.edu] for the password.
Refreshments will be provided.
We look forward to seeing you!
Yours in Mass Cult,
Gary and Cooper
The Cold Cold Open: Residues of Container Shipping in The X-Files and Later Television Dramas
The place of The X-Files within the genealogy of complex television should be understood through its innovative use of the pre-credit sequence or “cold open,” which points to a new availability of space in American culture. These cold opens foreground an affect of unknowing that the series links to international logistical networks, which radically transformed the global distribution of labor in the 1990s. While most accounts of narrative complexity focus on disjunctions in time, The X-Files demonstrates the importance of space in these same television narratives, and in doing so suggests the political and historical content of narrative complexity.
Steven Maye is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago.