You may recall that a while back we posted an item about a guy at Texas Tech who is assembling a book of scholarly papers about MST3K. He’s pushed his deadlines a little but they are now approaching and he’s asked that we post another note.
Here’s a full description of what he’s looking for.
As we noted previously, Satellite News is not involved in the project.
I’m a professor who has submitted a paper to this project, and I want to clarify a bit on what a project like this is, since last time it was posted some fans cautiously wondered if Rob was trying to “get us to do his work for him,” as one person put it. That is not what this is. Rob Weiner, who is a librarian at Texas Tech, is putting together an anthology, a collection of chapters by different authors, featuring different perspectives on MST3K. This is a very common practice. He has another anthology that is coming out soon: “Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History and Cataloging” (available through Amazon). An anthology like this is considered a scholarly piece of work, and what that means is that he’s looking for papers that use things like English/Literature, Media Studies, Sociology, Psychology, etc., to explain why MST3K is so important–to us, and in general.
So, if you do any kind of writing–maybe you are a college student who wrote a paper on MST3K, or a teacher who uses MST3K in the classroom, or whatever, you should think about contributing. I did, because I would love to see a book taking MST3K seriously, as seriously as other books have taken shows like The Simpsons and Seinfeld.
I hope that helps.
The deadline says “April 31st, 2010, No exceptions!” Hehe.
I don’t know how I missed this before, but I just now stumbled across it. I’m going to try to put something together, but both of the ideas I’m toying with are a bit research heavy (and one would involve some Lacan, so…..). We’ll see.
Crazed fans? I have not idea who he’s talking about…