Join DePaul University professor and Humanities Center fellow John Shanahan on Thursday, February 17, 2011 for an engaging look at the changing relations of science, fiction, and science fiction in American and Japanese culture.

The Music Box Theatre will screen two films—The Wild Blue Yonder (2005) and Ghost in the Shell (1995). Between the film screenings, a panel of distinguished scholars will discuss some creative remediations of science and technology in contemporary fiction and film.

DePaul and Columbia College students and faculty get in FREE to all events with ID.

All events are open to the public.

Schedule of Events:

• The Wild Blue Yonder 6:00pm
• Panel Discussion 7:30-8:30pm
• Ghost in the Shell 8:45pm

The panelists:

June Chung, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, specializes in fin-de-siecle American literature. She has published articles on modern capitalism and the arts, media and technology, orientalism, and commercial cosmopolitanism.

Daniel Dinello, a filmmaker and author, is a Columbia College Professor and its Distinguished Scholar for 2011-2012. He is the author of Technophobia! Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology and contributed chapters to Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy and Anime and Philosophy.

Miho Matsugu, Assistant Professor of Japanese at DePaul University, specializes in modern Japanese literature and culture. She has produced critical writings on Kawabata Yasunari, Kirino Natsuo and Murakami Haruki.

John Shanahan, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, specializes in the relations of literature and science since the Renaissance. His work has appeared in Genre, Studies in English Literature, and other journals and books.

The Films:

The Wild Blue Yonder (2005). Werner Herzog’s mind-bending mash-up of science fiction and ‘mockumentary’ splices actual NASA footage, a delusional narrator who believes he’s an alien, clips of Antarctic ocean exploration recast as video retrieved from the Andromeda galaxy, and a hauntingly other-worldly soundtrack.

Ghost in the Shell (1995). Oshii’s original anime masterpiece, set in the year 2029, tells the story of a cyborg special forces officer on the trail of a rogue computer program called ‘The Puppet Master.’ Oshii’s beautiful fusion of film, animation, still photography, and other media is at the same time a complex meditation on the increasingly unpredictable entanglement of human and machine in contemporary culture.