Media Studies Workshop with Alex Harasymiw

Join us on Friday, February 21st for the next session of the Media Studies Workshop, where we will discuss Alex Harasymiw's paper, "Bad Sax: Soviet Laughter, Science Fiction, and Speculation in Alexandr Andrijevsky's Loss of Sensation (1935). A pre-circulated paper will be sent by email upon RSVP.
 

This paper takes up the speculative historical potential of bad science fiction films through Alexandr Andriyevsky’s early Soviet sound film, Loss of Sensation (1935), and in particular, explores the ways in which affective reception and spectatorship come to represent a form of historical agency. Against the binary classification of Soviet SF as either politically repressive or subversive, the laughable elements of bad SF, its thematic incongruities, questionable gimmicks, and shoddy production values, represent an opportunity to reimagine film audiences as historical agents, actively producing a sense of self and community in spite of the contents projected before them. By locating Andriyevsky’s Loss of Sensation within the broader discourse on Soviet SF and popular culture of its time, this paper speculates about the possibility of bad SF unintentionally producing a form of aesthetic experience reminiscent of the aspirations of the early Soviet avant-garde artists of the 1920s, rendering visible the meaning-making processes of political discourse, and through laughter, opening up a space for renegotiating a collective sense of reality.

 

Alex Harasymiw is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his MA in Theory and Criticism from the University of Western Ontario for his thesis entitled: “Hallucinating the Ukrainian Cityscape: A Reevaluation of Walter Benjamin’s Urban Experience for a Postsocialist Context.” His current research involves speculative historiography and representations of the apocalypse in Sinophone science fiction. He has previously taught a course on the relationship between science fiction, media studies, and historiography, as well as one on comics and critical theory. He is also interested in world literature, exploitation films, lost media, humour, video games, and Soviet science fiction.  

 

 

Please RSVP to receive Alex Harasymiw's pre-circulated paper. 

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For more information on upcoming sessions, consult the spring semester schedule. 

 

This is an online event held on Zoom.