Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen

Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen PDF Author: Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501356402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Myths such as Narcissus' reflection, Pandora's box, and Plato's cave have been used to frame modern technological dangers; often to describe people absorbed in their own digital reflections. Such speculation either purports that technology has a magical power or else that technology merely represents human nature unchanged from the myth's inception. But those accounts ignore the paradoxical understandings of the power relationships allegorized, where people are manipulated by higher forces beyond their comprehension. Working from the assumption that capitalism rather than God is the highest power, this book examines mythic anticipations of the screen and digital technology from European literature, poetry, folklore and philosophy. Digital technology and social media are approached not as reflections of human nature but capitalist ideology's power to enchant. To this end, Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen also surveys a diverse variety of films, digital media and contemporary artworks to understand and critique how myths are reimagined today.

Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen

Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen PDF Author: Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501356402
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Myths such as Narcissus' reflection, Pandora's box, and Plato's cave have been used to frame modern technological dangers; often to describe people absorbed in their own digital reflections. Such speculation either purports that technology has a magical power or else that technology merely represents human nature unchanged from the myth's inception. But those accounts ignore the paradoxical understandings of the power relationships allegorized, where people are manipulated by higher forces beyond their comprehension. Working from the assumption that capitalism rather than God is the highest power, this book examines mythic anticipations of the screen and digital technology from European literature, poetry, folklore and philosophy. Digital technology and social media are approached not as reflections of human nature but capitalist ideology's power to enchant. To this end, Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen also surveys a diverse variety of films, digital media and contemporary artworks to understand and critique how myths are reimagined today.

Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen

Capitalism and the Enchanted Screen PDF Author: Aleks Wansbrough
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781501356384
Category : Capitalism and mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Chapter 1: Introduction to Magical Technology and Dis-Enchanting Screens -- Chapter 2: Lost in Reflection: Selfies and the Echo of Narcissus -- Chapter 3:Interactive Entrapment Beyond Plato, Popcorn and The Matrix -- Chapter 4: Digital Haunting, Vampires and Time Loops -- Chapter 5: Pygmalion and Virtual Selves -- Chapter 6: Babel and the Internet Tower -- Chapter 7: The Invisible Cloaks, Rings and Trappings of the Capitalist Systems -- Chapter 8: Digital Media as Pandora's Box Ajar -- Conclusion -- Endnotes -- References -- Index.

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English

Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English PDF Author: Om Prakash Dwivedi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031068173
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
This book analyzes precarious conditions and their manifestations in recent South Asian literature in English. Themes of disability, rural-urban division, caste, terrorism, poverty, gender, necropolitics, and uneven globalization are discussed in this book by established and emerging international scholars. Drawing their arguments from literary works rooted in the neoliberal period, the chapters show how the extractive ideology of neoliberalism invades the cultural, political, economic, and social spheres of postcolonial South Asia. The book explores different forms of “precarity” to investigate the vulnerable and insecure life conditions embodied in the everyday life of South Asia, enabling the reader to see through the rhetoric of “rising Asia”.

Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities

Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities PDF Author: Om Prakash Dwivedi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040119522
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art. COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillance as well as the asymmetries within populations and divides in health outcomes between the Global North and Global South. Indeed, societies that have experienced the horrors of settler colonialism have already survived apocalypses. COVID-19 serves then as a premonition for our climate emergency as well as an echo of other apocalyptic situations, both real and imagined. This book consists of essays from acclaimed theorists and scholars writing amid the pandemic and exposes the asymmetries of our divided world. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature including post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing and are accompanied by a new afterword.

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis PDF Author: Janet M. Wilson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040230237
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North–South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet’s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale

Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale PDF Author: Mayako Murai
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Readers will find inspiration and new directions in the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approaches to fairy tales provided by Re-Orienting the Fairy Tale.

A Mile of Make-Believe

A Mile of Make-Believe PDF Author: Steve Penfold
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144262924X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
A Mile of Make Believe examines the unique history of the Santa Claus parade in Canada. This volume focuses on the Eaton's sponsored parades that occurred in Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg as well as the shorter-lived parades in Calgary and Edmonton. There is also a discussion of small town alternatives, organized by civic groups, service clubs, and chambers of commerce. By focusing on the pioneering effort of the Eaton's department store Steve Penfold argues that the parade ultimately represented a paradoxical form of cultural power: it allowed Eaton's to press its image onto public life while also reflecting the decline of the once powerful retailer. Penfold's analysis reveals the "corporate fantastic" - a visual and narrative mix of meticulous organization and whimsical style- and its influence on parade traditions. Steve Penfold's considerable analytical skills have produced a work that is simultaneously a cultural history, history of business and commentary on consumerism. Professional historians and the general public alike would be remiss if this wasn't on their holiday wish list.

Liquid Crystals

Liquid Crystals PDF Author: Esther Leslie
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178023693X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
While it is responsible for today’s abundance of flat screens—on televisions, computers, and mobile devices—most of us have only heard of it in the ubiquitous acronym, LCD, with little thought as to exactly what it is: liquid crystal. In this book, Esther Leslie enlightens us, offering an accessible and fascinating look at—not a substance, not a technology—but a wholly different phase of matter. As she explains, liquid crystal is a curious material phase that organizes a substance’s molecules in a crystalline form yet allows them to move fluidly like water. Observed since the nineteenth century, this phase has been a deep curiosity to science and, in more recent times, the key to a new era of media technology. In between that time, as Leslie shows, it has figured in cultural forms from Romantic landscape painting to snow globes, from mountaineering to eco-disasters, and from touchscreen devices to DNA. Expertly written but accessible, Liquid Crystals recounts the unheralded but hugely significant emergence of this unique form of matter.

The Classic Novel

The Classic Novel PDF Author: Erica Sheen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 152618575X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This book critically examines the long established tradition of adapting classic novels to film or TV screen. An emerging area of interest - the relationship between film and literature and the way cinema and television have translated classic novels into moving pictures from the 30s to the 90s.. A wide-ranging but focused collection that is bang up to date and free of media jargon that looks at both the film and the book.. Includes discussion of: The English Patient, Pride and Prejudice and Middlemarch, Pickwick Papers, Dracula, Dickens, Conrad, Hardy and Waugh.

The Book that Made Me

The Book that Made Me PDF Author: Judith Ridge
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763696714
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Essays by popular children's authors reveal the books that shaped their personal and literary lives, explaining how the stories they loved influenced them creatively, politically, and intellectually.