Reading Westworld

Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth Century Literature and Culture at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She researches and publishes on modernism, technology, women’s writing, feminism, poetry and American culture. Antonia Mackay is Teaching Fellow of English Literature at Oxford Brookes University, UK. She is co-editor of a surveillance cultural studies collection with Palgrave Macmillan. Her research is focused on American literature and culture, twentieth and twenty-first century literature and cultural and media studies.

• 1. Introduction, Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay.- 2. These violent delights: Navigating Westworld as ‘quality’ television, Kim Wilkins.- 3. ‘That which is real is irreplaceable’: Lies, Damned Lies, and (Dis)Simulations in Westworld, Will Slocombe.- 4. Factitive Maps: Manipulating Landscapes and Characters in Vast Narratives, Guilia Taurino and Sara Casoli.- 5. Westworld and the Pursuit of Meaningful Play, Andra Ivanescu.- 6. Music as a Source of Narrative Information in HBO’s Westworld, Kingsley Marshall.- 7. The Frontier Myth of Memory, Dreams, and Trauma in Westworld, Carol Erwin.- 8. Long Live the New Flesh: Race and the Posthuman in Westworld, Sherryl Vint.- 9. Flies in the Face: Entomology and the Mechanics of Becoming-Living in Westworld, Kristen Tregar.- 10. Westworld’s Archideology and the Impossibility of Freedom, Antonia Mackay.- 11. A Mere Instrument of Production: Representing Domestic Labour in Westworld, Sadek Kessous.- 12. Escaping the Robot’s Loop? Power and Purpose, Myth and History in Westworld’s Manufactured Frontier, Dustin Abnet.- 13. I-n- I re-member now: A Rastafari Reading of HBO’s Westworld, Milt Moise.- 14. The Theme Park of Forking Paths: Text, Intertext and Hypertext in Westworld, Alex Goody.- 15. Yul Brynner’s Hat and Time Travel in the Hyperreal, Leander Reeves.- 16. Epilogue, Alex Goody and Antonia Mackay.