“So What Happens Now?”: Ernest Cline’s Prose and Poetry
Calling all Gunters! The past few years have seen a growing number of scholarly interventions on Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), exploring topics that range from his portrayal of dys/utopias (see Nordstrom, Ue) to his use of Pac-Man as a metaphor (Ue and Munday), and from Cline’s treatment of masculinity (Condis) to his invocation of Arthurian romance (Aronstein and Thompson). In 2018, the novel was adapted into a critically and commercially successful hit, earning an Academy Award nomination.