The X-Files and Literature: Unweaving the Story, Unraveling the Lie to Find the Truth

Item Number

PN1992.77.X22

Author/Artist/Editor

Sharon R. Yang

Type

Book, Hard Copy

Date

2007

Press/Publisher

Cambridge Scholars

Language

English

Description

This volume provides an innovative and valuable exploration of the groundbreaking television program. Although much academic work has been devoted to the social, psychological, and spiritual significance of The X-Files, until this collection none has fully addressed the series rich adaptation of literature to interrogate our perception, definition, or recounting of the truth. This collection not only unveils new twists and insights into expected connections between The X-Files and Gothic writers or with its modernist and post-modernist slants on narrative, plot, and characterization. The X-Files and Literature also delves into some unexpected literary sources shaping the series, such as the Arthurian quest, Catholic and Biblical mythology, folkloristics, and James Fennimore Cooper and the vanishing American mythos. This collection of essays covers both how The X-Files works with literature s own constantly morphing definition and portrayal of truth through form and content, as well as how the television program may or may not subvert our own contradictory expectations and distrust of literature s providing us with enlightenment. 'As television becomes more and more literary, with shows like Lost and Gilmore Girls sending us off to the bookstore and the library so we might read them more carefully, a book like The X-Files and Literature is welcome indeed. Sharon R. Yang s diverse collection on one of Nineties TV s richest texts finds the truth of the gothic and the Arthurian and the folkloric, of the postmodern and the metafictional, of Poe, Pynchon, Cooper, Nabokov, and Tennyson, not just out there but in the perhaps too complicated narrative of the perpetually frustrated quests of Mulder and Scully. Valuable-in-itself as an intellectual exercise, its real worth may come when we put the book down and return, smarter, better readers, to the primary text.

Keywords

TV, X Files

ISSN/ISBN

9781847182395

Availability

Available

OCLC

169582888