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In The Morph-Image: The Subjunctive Synthesis of Time, Steen Ledet Christiansen argues for a new model of digital cinema that draws on Deleuzian and Whiteheadian insights into time and the future. This model insists that the philosophy of time must be rethought to provide a better understanding of the future and that the digital capacities of post-cinema present occasions of thought well-suited to this task. The figure of the morph, Christiansen posits, allows a conception of how post-cinema expresses time as a means of capture that appears liberatory, but modulates subjectivities into temporal forms of control. These temporal forms include digital animacies, flows, loops, synthetic long tak...
The New Cinematic Weird argues that weird fiction is rising also in audiovisual culture. Presenting several detailed analyses of weird cinematic works, the book shows how the new cinematic weird is best understood as atmospheric worldings — affective intensities that suffuse the experience of the cinematic weird. The weird exists as an experiential field, an inflation of the world. These worldings disclose a variety of experiences. The book engagingly shows how creepy, unsettling, ominous, uneasy, and eerie atmospheres provide a way into the weird experience. This book is important to anyone interested in the audiovisual weird, cinematic atmospheres, how audiovisual media produce worlds, and how weird fiction challenges our conception of the way the world is.
Steen Ledet Christiansen's Storytelling in "Kabuki" explores the series created by David Mack--a slow, recursive narrative that focuses on the death of Kabuki and her past. The series ran from 1994 to 2004 in a variety of miniseries, one-shots, and spin-offs, rather than following a conventional American monthly release schedule. Most of the series explores different perspectives on the same event and adds background to Kabuki's past, usually through surreal sequences, dreams, and near-death experiences. The flexibility of comics' approach to chronology, space, focalization, narrative, and fictionality enabled Mack to produce an unusual experience. Kabuki tells a story that can only exist vi...
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism brings together international scholars from a wide range of disciplines to provide a snapshot of the diverse ways in which medievalism--the retrospective immersion in the images, sounds, narratives, and ideologies of the European Middle Ages--powerfully transforms many of the varied musical traditions of the last two centuries.
Transformative Reading belongs to a growing tradition of studies investigating the functions of aesthetic experiences in our lives. Philosophers, literary theorists, and psychologists have suggested that aesthetic experiences implicate and develop our sense of ourselves. Literary texts, as one such experience, challenge readers and extend their imagination by means of complex or deviating plots. Reading literary narrative fiction helps readers develop imaginary selves in a safe way, enhancing their theory of mind. It might also contribute to the development of readers’ interpersonal competencies and foster pro-sociality, altruistic behaviour, and empathy. This book uses empirical research methods to focus on the processes of literary reading, revealing two pathways for the transformative powers of literature. It also reveals how an understanding of these pathways might be beneficial in educational settings – in schools, in the workplace, and in medical contexts.
What is the ocean’s role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Søren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk’s logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and Joseph Conrad as well as their 20th and 21st century-heirs like J. G. Ballard, Jens Bjørneboe, and Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen. A Poetic History of the Oceans promotes what Frank labels an amphibian comparative literature and mobilises recent theoretical concepts and methodological developments in Blue Humanities, Blue Ecology, and New Materialism to shed new light on well-known texts and introduce readers to important, but lesser-known Scandinavian literary engagements with the sea.
Drawing together strands of film theory and psychology, this book offers a fresh assessment of the found footage horror subgenre. It reconceptualizes landmark films--including The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cloverfield (2008), Paranormal Activity (2009), and Man Bites Dog (1992)--as depictions of the lived experience and social legacy of psychological trauma. The author demonstrates how the frantic cinematography and ambiguous formulation of the monster evokes the shocked and disoriented cognition of the traumatized mind. Moreover, the frightening effect of trauma on society is shown to be a recurring theme across the subgenre. Close textual analysis is given to a wide range of films over several decades, including titles that have yet to receive any academic attention. Divided into four distinct sections, the book examines how found footage horror films represent the effects of historical and contemporary traumatic events on Western societies, the vicarious spread of traumatic experiences via mass media, the sublimation of domestic abuse into haunted houses, and the viewer's identification with the monster as an embodiment of perpetrator trauma.
A comprehensive overview of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities. Drone technology has garnered critical attention across many fields, from engineering to the humanities. While the first wave of drone scholarship was key in initiating the debate on drones, it also privileged the idea of the “scopic regime”—a militarized regime of hypervisuality—in its analyses of the connection between vision and power. The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities broadens the drone’s spectrum of perception by acknowledging its creative, life-affirming possibility with the notion of the sensorium. The sensorium of the drone is a multimedi...
At a time when technological advances are transforming cultures and supporting new automated military operations, action films engage the senses and, in doing so, allow viewers to embody combat roles. This book argues that through film the viewer adapts to an ecology of fear, one that reflects global panic at the near-constant threat of conflict and violence. Often overwhelming in its audiovisual assault, action cinema attempts to overpower our bodies with its own through force and intensity. In this book, Steen Ledet Christiansen identifies five aspects central to how action films produce such physical movements and responses through vectors, droning, kinetics, telesomatics and volatility and in so doing unveils new modes of perception that acclimatise us for warfare. Drawing on theories from film-philosophy and a consideration of the aesthetics and phenomenology of war, this is an innovative study of the evolving action movie and its role in the targeted address of battle. Chapters investigate new modes of cinematic experience through in-depth case studies of Iron Man, Avatar and the Jason Bourne trilogy, through to The Hurt Locker and Mad Max: Fury Road. "
Transcultural Perspectives in Literature, Language, Art, and Politics is a contribution to the field of transcultural studies that has been gaining ground since the turn of the twentieth century. Embracing the transcultural lens in the humanities and social sciences, it demonstrates how the relevance, necessity and wide range of this approach can better enhance our understanding of the contemporary world as well as the past. Though all the contributors have a humanities background, they work in different research fields such as literary studies, linguistics, translation studies, cinema, or intellectual history, and use a variety of theoretical frames. A transdisciplinary framework also seems...