My Digital Quest

Hello internet community, fellow literary critics, and all fans of general "nerdom"!

I'll be continuing to use this space to explore the genre of Speculative/Science Fiction, and the narratives that I'll be analyzing will include literature, film, and video games.

In the past, I've posted here specifically about Science Fiction and Fantasy in the Post-Civil Rights Era, and I'll continue to revisit some important points of analysis such as genre studies and expectations, ethical responses (by us, the audience, as well as the fictional characters), the ambiguity in defining "humanness," and representations of technology and virtual/alternate reality,

One project that will be getting a lot of attention on this blog will be focused on the trope of the "quest narrative" and its continuing predominance in modern narratives, specifically video games.

I'll be utilizing the video game "The Last of Us," developed by Naughty Dog (2013), to examine the ways in which this modern quest narrative adheres to and deviates from Medieval quest narrative expectations, such as a dual protagonist, a dual quest (one spiritual, one physical), and travel.

I will incorporate both creative and critical aspects to this project.

For each of the seven posts I will dedicate to this project, one paragraph will be my creative invention of a journal entry from the perspective of the main protagonist, Joel.

This will be reminiscent of fan fiction in its imaginative creation, but everything included in this paragraph will consider Joel's personal backstory and the context of the specific moment that I am transforming into a journal entry.

A second paragraph will be my own analysis of the fashioned journal entry, and will reference Medieval narratives as evidence for "medievalism" in this non-Medieval narrative.

This project is for my Medieval Literature class, but it is important to note that themes of the fantastic (fairies, elves, magic) and the science fictional (alchemy, time travel) have their origins in this early time period.

This project will examine the distant past of Science Fiction and Fantasy in comparison to modern representations.

The quest narrative is a trope that has been utilized from Homer's The Odyssey to "The Story of the Grail" by Chretien de Troyes to J. R. R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and even in works that I've previously examined here, such as Octavia Butler's Kindred and Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson.

The role of the quest narrative across Speculative Fiction genres is as important, relevant, and present today as it was centuries ago, and it has been incredibly useful for allegorically exploring concepts at the global, societal, and individual levels, such as:

social and political change

the disadvantages of globalization

coming-of-age through adolescence

the importance of access to education

the experience of immigrating away from one's native land to an alien country

surviving and overcoming mental illness and abuse

humanity's place among nature and in the universe

a transition and realization of the "self"

The intersection of Video Game Studies and Speculative Fiction Literary Criticism will allow me to not simply analyze literature or film on their own, but rather to make critical interpretations of common themes across media.

This is the scope of Speculative Fiction--it reaches into the deep past, the distant future, and a multiplicity of media resources in the present.

Let our Digital Quest begin.