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A major study of the major and minor fiction, poetry, and children's books of SF and fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin. As Le Guin herself writes, "It is written in English, not academese, and will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students, scholars, and interested readers."
A selection of papers delivered at Chicon IV, including "Stephen King in Context," (Joseph F. Patrouch, Jr.); "Narcissism and Romance in McCaffrey's 'Restoree, '" (Mary T. Brizzi; "Harlan Ellison's Use of the Narrator's Voice" (Joseph F. Patrouch, Jr., more.
The work of Karl Marx is revered in social philosophy, political science and literary criticism, but there is an area where Marxism seems not to have penetrated. That area is the study of popular culture, especially the cinema, where Marxism provides a useful lens through which seemingly disparate films can be explored. As a whole the new essays assembled here approach a wide cross-section of cinematic history and provide analysis of blockbusters, cult hits, comedies, suspenseful dramas and history-making films within a framework of power, power relations and class struggle. The collection brings to popular culture studies the same scholarly weight that attends the work of Aristotle or Plato or Derrida and, at the same time, presents that scholarship in an accessible style.
This Companion offers a comprehensive introduction to the life and work of a major figure of the modern world. Combining breadth of coverage with depth, the book opens with essays on More's family, early life and education, his literary humanism, virtuoso rhetoric, illustrious public career and ferocious opposition to emergent Protestantism, and his fall from power, incarceration, trial and execution. These chapters are followed by in-depth studies of five of More's major works - Utopia, The History of King Richard the Third, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation and De Tristitia Christi - and a final essay on the varied responses to the man and his writings in his own and subsequent centuries. The volume provides an accessible overview of this fascinating figure to students and other interested readers, whilst also presenting, and in many areas extending, the most important modern scholarship on him.
Using key canonical science fiction narratives, 'Mesmerists, Monsters, and Machines' examines the intersection of the literary and scientific cultures of the 19th century.
Apocalyptic AI, the hope that we might one day upload our minds into machines or cyberspace and live forever, is a surprisingly wide-spread and influential idea, affecting everything from the world view of online gamers to government research funding and philosophical thought. In Apocalyptic AI, Robert Geraci offers the first serious account of this "cyber-theology" and the people who promote it. Drawing on interviews with roboticists and AI researchers and with devotees of the online game Second Life, among others, Geraci illuminates the ideas of such advocates of Apocalyptic AI as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil. He reveals that the rhetoric of Apocalyptic AI is strikingly similar to that of...
This challenging new book looks at the current reinvention of American Studies: a reinvention that, among other things, has put the whole issue of just what is ‘American’ and what is ‘American Studies’ into contention. The collection focuses, in particular, on American mythology. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either classical European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwa mythology and contemporary U.S. culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America....
This book presents and engages the world-building capacity of legal theory through cultural legal studies of science and speculative fictions. In these studies, the contributors take seriously the legal world building of science and speculative fiction to reveal, animate and critique legal wisdom: juris-prudence. Following a common approach in cultural legal studies, the contributors engage directly, and in detail, with specific cultural ‘texts’, novels, television, films and video games in order to explore a range of possible legal futures. The book is organized in three parts: first, the contextualisation of science and speculative fiction as jurisprudence; second, the temporality of law and legal theory and third, the analysis of specific science and speculative fictions. Throughout, the contributors reveal the way in which law as nomos builds normative universes through the narration of a future. This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in legal theory, cultural legal studies, law and the humanities and law and literature.
Cybersociety 2.0, the new edition of Steven G. Jones′s Cybersociety, is also rooted in criticism and analysis of computer-mediated technologies to assist readers in becoming critically aware of the hype and hopes pinned on computer-mediated communication and the cultures that are emerging among Internet users. Both books are products of a particular moment in time and serve as snapshots of the concerns and issues that surround the burgeoning new technologies of communication. After a brief introduction to the history of computer-mediated communication, each chapter in this volume specifically highlights specific cyber "societies" and how computer-mediated communication effects the notion o...
Across three decades and four films, Lt. Ellen Ripley's struggle wtih the fierce and terrible Alien and the powers that desire it traces the arc of women's struggles in America.