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Cultures of Obsolescence
Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.
An Eclectic Bestiary
The essays, poetry, and visual art collected here consider the more-than-human cultures of our multispecies world. At a time when humanity's impact has put our planet's ecosystems into great jeopardy, the book explores literary, sonic, and visual imaginaries that feature encounters between and across a variety of living creatures: beetles and bisons, people and pigeons, trees and spiderwebs, vegetables and violets, orchards and octopi, vampires and tricksters. Offering a wide range of critical and creative contributions to Human Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies and the Nonhuman Turn, the volume seeks to foster new ways of imagining a more »response-able« coexistence on our shared Earth.
The Literary Life of Things
Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. This material culture has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination, yet scholars in literary and cultural studies have only recently (re)discovered the object world as a subject of critical inquiry. Engaging a great range of American literature--from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen--The Literary Life of Things illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.
Actor-Network Theory at the Movies
This book is one of the first to apply the theoretical tools proposed by French philosopher Bruno Latour to film studies. Through the example of the Hollywood Teen Film and with a particular focus on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the book delineates how Teen Film has established itself as one of Hollywood’s most consistent and dynamic genres. While many productions may recycle formulaic patterns, there is also a proliferation of cinematic coming-of-age narratives that are aesthetically and politically progressive, experimental, and complex. The case studies develop a Latourian film semiotics as a flexible analytical approach which raises new questions, not only about the history, types and tropes of teen films, but also about their aesthetics, mediality, and composition. Through an exploration of a wide and diverse range of examples from the past decade, including films by female and African-American directors, urban and rural perspectives, and non-heteronormative sexualities, Actor-Network Theory at the Movies demonstrates how the classic Teen Film canon has been regurgitated, expanded, and renewed.
It Takes a Storyteller to Know a Storyteller
Exposing capital for the con artist and storyteller it is, the book shows how the post-millennial novels of William Gibson, Douglas Coupland, and Dave Eggers work to dismantle the fictions (or illusions) capitalist globalization spurs and continues to rely on.
Unmaking Waste
Explores the concept of waste from fresh historical, cultural, and geographical perspectives. Garbage is often assumed to be an inevitable part and problem of human existence. But when did people actually come to think of things as “trash”—as becoming worthless over time or through use, as having an end? Unmaking Waste tackles these questions through a long-term, cross-cultural approach. Drawing on archaeological finds, historical documents, and ethnographic observations to examine Europe, the United States, and Central America from prehistory to the present, Sarah Newman traces how different ideas about waste took shape in different times and places. Newman examines what people consid...
Visions of Humanity
This book offers a critical reflection of the historical genesis, transformation, and problématique of “humanity” in the transatlantic world, with a particular eye on cultural representations. “Humanity,” the essays show, was consistently embedded in networks of actors and cultural practices, and its meanings have evolved in step with historical processes such as globalization, cultural imperialism, the transnationalization of activism, and the spread of racism and nationalism. Visions of Humanity applies a historical lens on objects, sounds, and actors to provide a more nuanced understanding of the historical tensions and struggles involved in constructing, invoking, and instrumentalizing the “we” of humanity.
Simulating Antiquity in Boys' Adventure Fiction
A genre that glorifies brutish masculinity and late Victorian imperialism, boys' 'lost world' adventure fiction has traditionally been studied for its politically problematic content. While attuned to these concerns, this Element approaches the genre from a different angle, viewing adventure fiction as not just a catalogue of texts but a corpus of books. Examining early editions of Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines, and The Lost World, the Element argues that fin-de-siècle adventure fiction sought to resist the nineteenth-century industrialisation of book production from within. As the Element points out, the genre is filled with nostalgic simulations of material anachronisms – 'facsimiles' of fictional pre-modern paper, printing, and handwriting that re-humanise the otherwise alienating landscape of the modern book and modern literary production. The Element ends by exploring a subversive revival of lost world adventure fiction that emerged in response to ebooks at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Writing Our Extinction
Mid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by write...
