Ready to take a break from the classroom? Come join the department next week for a Works-in-Progress presentation. Dr. Marguerite Rippy will deliver this fall’s presentation on Wednesday, Sept. 24, at 5:30 in the Reinsch Reception Room. The title of her talk will be “‘Truthiness’ in the Media: The Aftermath of Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’.”
The talk will explore the entertainment legacies of Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 Halloween broadcast, which panicked listeners by using a realistic news broadcast style to convey a fictitious narrative. Over time, blurring the boundary between truth and fiction in the media became a common entertainment strategy that Steven Colbert recently labeled “truthiness.” The talk will trace Welles’ early experiments with the line between fact and fiction—a theme often explored in his later cinema work.
Come join the department in catching up with Dr. Rippy’s research.
My short story, “The Bad Thing that Happens to Good People,” is the featured story at http://www.fictionweekly.com this week.