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Hello, my name is Kirk Combe. I teach at Denison University in the United States.\
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I work in the field of literature and cultural studies and I've been asked to talk about a book I've recently published.\
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This one right here called, Speculative Satire in Contemporary Literature and Film: Rant Against the Regime.\
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It was published by Routledge in 2021. The first question I've been asked to address is the aim in writing this book.\
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And this is a piece of academic writing,\
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a piece of scholarship that is proposing the existence of a distinct form of political satire that has arisen over the past 40 years or so,\
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what I'm calling speculative satire or 
\f1\i the Rant
\f0\i0 .\
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And it combines three distinct genres that of satire, that of science fiction and that of the monster tale.\
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The purpose of this form of satire is to attack the dominant social orthodoxies\
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that have grown up in our in Western culture and maybe globally in the past four decades,\
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namely neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. This form of attack comes in major novels such as Margaret Atwood's 
\f1\i The MaddAddam Trilogy
\f0\i0 .\
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Mainstream films such as Bong Joon-ho\'92s 
\f1\i Snowpiercer
\f0\i0  or Jordan Peele's 
\f1\i Get Out
\f0\i0  and most recently in very,\
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very popular streaming series such as 
\f1\i The Handmaid's Tale
\f0\i0  on Hulu or 
\f1\i Westworld
\f0\i0  on HBO.\
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So the purpose is to talk about how this form of political satire works, the various elements of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism that it attacks,\
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and I'm saying that the purpose of this satire is to wake us up to just how\
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destructive these orthodoxies are and just disturb us in very spectacular ways.\
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The second question I've been asked to talk about is how did I find the process of writing this book with some parts of it easier,\
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some parts of it more difficult? And I must say writing an academic book is rather like deciding to run a marathon,\
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you convince yourself it's a good idea, for some reason andnd then you just put your head down and do all the work.\
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So there's lots and lots of work in preparation for writing a book such as this, reading other scholarship,\
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reading all the primary materials, thinking about what theory to apply and how to apply it, etc., etc.\
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That's a bit like the training portion of the marathon, about a lot of fun, but it can be rewarding.\
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And then when the race starts and you start actually writing this book, it can become quite a slog.\
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You have to be bloody-minded about it. You have to put your head down very often and just work your way through it.\
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Now, certainly some aspects of writing this book were more pleasurable than others.\
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I particularly enjoyed learning a lot about science fiction and the theory behind science fiction.\
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I've always consumed and enjoyed that genre, but I've never really looked into\
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it's critical distinctions and what various scholars and critics have thought about it and how it works.\
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I'm very familiar, I've worked a lot in the field of satire and that of monster tales\
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so combining science fiction and that was quite nice.\
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I also very much enjoy writing about popular culture: films, major novels, TV series, that sort of thing,\
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because I think we need to think most about what we're supposed to think the least about.\
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We tend to think of popular entertainment\
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as just that,something to consume like popcorn, not really to think about it andwhat it might mean about our culture and society,\
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so that's always enjoyable.\
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Perhaps the most challenging aspect of writing this book was a chapter I wrote on exactly what is neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism.\
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It's very easy to say satire attacks these things and then not talk much about them\
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but I thought I\'92d better give the reader a pretty good idea of what I think this form of satire is attacking in particular.\
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So I did a lot of work in sort of looking into how those doctrines operate,\
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the variety of their manifestations and exactly why they are destructive.\
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So that was difficult, but I think rewarding to do.\
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Finally, I've been asked to talk about how my time at Worcester influenced my writing, and it was absolutely foundational.\
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My time at Worcester, I was there way back in the 1980s.\
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I did my MLitt and DPhil there and it formed really my whole approach to university teaching and to academic writing.\
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I had some very good mentors there. In particular at Worcester was John Wilders.\
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A very well-known Shakespeare critic. He was wonderful. And it was my moral tutor, which we both knew was a precarious situation.\
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And he brought me to Worcester and I thank him very much for that.\
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I also had two thesis advisers Glenn Black at Oriel College, who was fantastic and equally \
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Emrys Jones at New College, who was wonderful.\
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Both of them were patient with me as I worked through my theories and my thoughts about this, about satire.\
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I was writing about satire at that point. And they really, they really pushed me.\
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and let me let me develop my own style.\
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So basically, Worcester was a wonderful experience for me.\
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And it was great to be there andnd thank you for listening to this.\
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}