Abstract
On Star Trek, the crew members of the USS Enterprise have a number of impressive tools at their disposal, from phasers to tricorders. Yet, one of their most useful items is one to which we already have access today: literature. From Shakespearean-line titles in Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), to the Dickensian and Melvillean themes in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (ST:II), to Data and his Sherlock Holmes fixation, literature has always served as a template for Star Trek, reinforcing its continued power and relevance; even in a world of interplanetary travel, real books still matter. This emphasis on literature makes Star Trek an excellent teaching tool. As Star Trek privileges texts, particularly the classics, the series and films can be used to effectively teach literature, from providing intertextual references to specific works to providing excellent examples for teaching concepts and themes in literature. In addition, Star Trek clearly portrays the value of literature and literary studies, even for those whose lives and work are outside traditional roles in the humanities.
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Notes
- 1.
The titles are taken, respectively, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Masque of Pandora” (1875), William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818).
- 2.
The reference to Branagh is slightly humorous, listing his performance alongside Olivier’s though Branagh’s Henry V was still in theaters at the time the episode aired.
- 3.
In connection with the Henry V holodeck performance, Stewart portrayed John of Gaunt in the Richard II (2012) installment of the BBC’s critically acclaimed The Hollow Crown, while Benedict Cumberbatch, Khan in the reboot film Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), plays the titular Richard III (2016).
- 4.
Ironically, the character of Chekov did not appear in TOS “Space Seed,” the episode that introduced Khan, though Commander Chekov and Khan remember each other clearly. Khan even claims that “I never forget a face,” before recalling Chekov’s name [2].
- 5.
Perhaps nothing in the Star Trek franchise epitomizes this theme as drastically as the 2009 reboot, in which one shipful of accidental time-travelling Romulan miners changes the trajectory of James Kirk’s life, and thus alters the whole original timeline.
- 6.
Scotty, confined to quarters for starting a bar fight with the Klingons over their insults to the Enterprise, is cheered by the fact that he will have time to catch up on his technical journals [10].
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For the entire text of this and other Robert Frost poems see: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44272
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Hardy, E.B. (2018). “Where Many Books Have Gone Before”: Using Star Trek to Teach Literature. In: Rabitsch, S., Gabriel, M., Elmenreich, W., Brown, J. (eds) Set Phasers to Teach!. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73776-8_1
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