Kevin, you contacted wetpaint about our being an "education" wiki, right? I'm curious about why I'm seeing banner ads in the left column...

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Much later in the book (much later than I suspect you were able to keep up your note-taking kevin_of_los_angeles), Valparaiso scolds Dr. Penninger and the rest of the remaining scientists at the Collaboratory thus:

"even though you are both directly responsible for the catastrophe that our society is undergoing, you are both incredibly adept at casting yourselves as permanent, misunderstood victims. You both whine and moan endlessly about how nobody else is cool enough or smart enough to understand you. And you both never clean up your own messes. And you both never take responsibility for yourselves" (373).

Valparaiso, here speaking about scientists in 2044, could easily be speaking about humanities scholars at the beginning of the twenty-first century (much of the richest allegorical content of the novel is contained in the discussions of “science"). More particularly, Valparaiso uncannily describes precisely the dynamic of what has occurred in this essay: you narratologists are directly responsible for the “catastrophe” the closed system of your reading of this novel is undergoing, yet you are “incredibly adept at casting yourselves as permanent, misunderstood victims.” When will we ever break this discursive self-destruction written under the sign of truth?

For more perspective on the matter, you might take a look at Alan Liu’s THE LAWS OF COOL. Liu argues rather compellingly that the New Critical gesture toward paradox is inextricably bound in "a slant version of truth according to which the very action of gesturing was as dogmatic as any attempt by orthodoxy or heterodoxy to point to polemical versions of truth" (38).

In any event, I am stunned by the degree to which you neglect the format of the wiki in this essay that, according to your editing history, you seem to emphatically support elsewhere. You and your rhetorical questions. How could anyone ever attempt to revise this solipsistic text?

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Wouldn't a project like this be more effective as a printed essay? Something you could actually publish? I mean, seriously. I know you're interpreting a science-fiction novel here, but isn't the Wiki form just a technological gimmick? The form-content conversation has never been able to keep the attention, let alone influence the methodology, of the academic sphere in any serious way. Leave that to the creative writers, I say. I don't see how you can make any concrete, sustainable claims, at any rate, when any non-credentialed activist can come in and modify the text of your project. With state-budget crisis after state-budget crisis threatening to shut our humanities departments down, the last thing we need are scholars and grad students in our own departments opening the door to our last closed space: our writing.

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