ABSTRACT
This chapter begins at the movies but this time it could be a week-long sci-fi festival. The popular 2008 family film WALL-E offers a benign twist on this symptomatic anxiety. Its premise is that a massive corporation called “Buy N Large” has co-evolved with consumerism until the earth becomes an unlivable trash heap, and the obese human race is evacuated onto comfortable starships where they drift through life snacking, as if on an extended sea-cruise vacation. Sentimental humanism is certainly under attack, and not just by the business-minded forces of neoliberalism. Techno-dystopic stories such as The Matrix and Logan’s Run have a stunningly prescient ancestor in E. M. Forster’s 1909 story “The Machine Stops.” In science non-fiction, the idea of a “selfish meme” appeared briefly towards the end of Richard Dawkins’s transformative 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Professors in the humanities, as in other academic areas, have been successful in fields where competition for jobs is overwhelming.
