Friending the Past

Friending the Past PDF Author: Alan Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645195X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.

Friending Rosie

Friending Rosie PDF Author: Judith Wright Favor
Publisher: Page Publishing Inc
ISBN: 1662427298
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
In alternating voices, Judith Wright Favor and Rosie Alfaro take the reader on a frank, frustrating, and unforgettable journey. Friending Rosie: Respect on Death Row bridges the chasm between souls consigned to life behind bars, and souls enjoying the privileges of freedom. Rosie’s letters from Central California Women’s Facility, interwoven with Judith’s reflections and questions, highlight perspectives from authors of different races, religions, and languages. Marginalized people stifle their stories when there is no one to hear, but mutual listening brings forth accounts of regret, doubt, humiliation, and grace. Some stories describe difficult encounters in prison. Family members with intimate knowledge of Rosie tell their stories. Other tales illustrate surprising parallels in the inner lives of both authors. Judith follows the friendly path of Quakers who began in the 1650s to value women’s leadership and befriend prisoners. Rosie grew up Catholic, in a faith tradition that shaped her art and values. Both write stories interwoven with social challenges and spiritual practices intended to support readers in reaching out to persons behind bars. 8-12-20: It’s yours, mine, and God’s book. I’ve been lettin people know about our book and about you. People are very interested in our story, and I know this is a start of a great journey. I’m very proud of us, friend... I wanted to tell you that to me this means nothing, but to lots of people who like crime stuff, me being the youngest and the first Latina to get the d. penalty in Calif. is a big deal. I’m personally ashamed of it, but there’s people who think it’s cool. I love you and you stay safe. Tu Amiga, Rosie Incarcerating our way to safety does not work. Friendships do work. These stories, rooted in caring and respect, offer a warmly satisfying testimony to the power of friending. *****

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age

The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age PDF Author: Adam Hammond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100934952X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
This book explores the way that digital forms and methods are reconfiguring the foundational concepts of literary studies.

Distant Horizons

Distant Horizons PDF Author: Ted Underwood
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661283X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us through digital libraries to tackle previously elusive questions about literature. Ted Underwood shows how digital archives and statistical tools, rather than reducing words to numbers (as is often feared), can deepen our understanding of issues that have always been central to humanistic inquiry. Without denying the usefulness of time-honored approaches like close reading, narratology, or genre studies, Underwood argues that we also need to read the larger arcs of literary change that have remained hidden from us by their sheer scale. Using both close and distant reading to trace the differentiation of genres, transformation of gender roles, and surprising persistence of aesthetic judgment, Underwood shows how digital methods can bring into focus the larger landscape of literary history and add to the beauty and complexity we value in literature.

The Social Media Revolution

The Social Media Revolution PDF Author: Jarice Hanson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610697685
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Social media shapes the ways in which we communicate, think about friends, and hear about news and current events. It also affects how users think of themselves, their communities, and their place in the world. This book examines the tremendous impact of social media on daily life. When the Internet became mainstream in the early 2000s, everything changed. Now that social media is fully entrenched in daily life, contemporary society has shifted again in how we communicate, behave as consumers, seek out and enjoy entertainment, and express ourselves. Every one of the new applications of social media presents us with a new way of thinking about the economy that supports technological development and communication content and offers new models that challenge us to think about the economic impact of communication in the 21st century. The Social Media Revolution examines the tremendous influence of social media on how we make meaning of our place in the world. The book emphasizes the economic impacts of how we use the Internet and World Wide Web to exchange information, enabling readers to see how social media has taken root and challenged previous media industries, laws, policies, and social practices. Each entry in this useful reference serves to document the history, impact, and criticism of every subject and shows how social media has become a primary tool of the 21st-century world—one that not only contributes to our everyday life and social practices but also affects the future of business. The coverage of topics is extremely broad, ranging from economic models and concepts relevant to social media, such as e-commerce, crowdfunding, the use of cyber currency, and the impact of freeware; to key technologies and devices like Android and Apple iOS, apps, the cloud, streaming, and smartphones and tablets; to major entrepreneurs, inventors, and subjects of social media, such as Julian Assange, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marissa Mayer, Edward Snowden, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg.

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy

The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy PDF Author: Kathy Eden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652664X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancient schools of philosophy. It was Petrarch’s encounter with this previously unknown Cicero and his letters that Kathy Eden argues fundamentally changed the way Europeans from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries were expected to read and write. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy explores the way ancient epistolary theory and practice were understood and imitated in the European Renaissance.Eden draws chiefly upon Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca—but also upon Plato, Demetrius, Quintilian, and many others—to show how the classical genre of the “familiar” letter emerged centuries later in the intimate styles of Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Along the way, she reveals how the complex concept of intimacy in the Renaissance—leveraging the legal, affective, and stylistic dimensions of its prehistory in antiquity—pervades the literary production and reception of the period and sets the course for much that is modern in the literature of subsequent centuries. Eden’s important study will interest students and scholars in a number of areas, including classical, Renaissance, and early modern studies; comparative literature; and the history of reading, rhetoric, and writing.

Writing in Real Time

Writing in Real Time PDF Author: Paul Jaussen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108170986
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad range of American long poems as emergent systems, capable of adaptation and transformation in response to environmental change. Due to these emergent properties, the long poem performs essential cultural work, offering a unique experience of history that remains valuable for our rapidly transforming digital age. Moving across a broad range of literary and theoretical texts, Writing in Real Time demonstrates that the study of emergence can enhance literary scholarship, just as literature provides unique insights into emergent properties, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

Friending the Past

Friending the Past PDF Author: Alan Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645200X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Can today’s society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic—and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all? In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history—such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism—and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today’s JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry. Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive “network archaeologies” can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.

Boy Nobody

Boy Nobody PDF Author: Allen Zadoff
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0316243892
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
They needed the perfect assassin. Boy Nobody is the perennial new kid in school, the one few notice and nobody thinks much about. He shows up in a new high school in a new town under a new name, makes a few friends, and doesn't stay long. Just long enough for someone in his new friend's family to die-of "natural causes." Mission accomplished, Boy Nobody disappears, moving on to the next target. But when he's assigned to the mayor of New York City, things change. The daughter is unlike anyone he has encountered before; the mayor reminds him of his father. And when memories and questions surface, his handlers at The Program are watching. Because somewhere deep inside, Boy Nobody is somebody: the kid he once was; the teen who wants normal things, like a real home and parents; a young man who wants out. And who just might want those things badly enough to sabotage The Program's mission. In this action-packed series debut, author Allen Zadoff pens a page-turning thriller that is as thought-provoking as it is gripping, introducing an utterly original and unforgettable antihero.

Local Transcendence

Local Transcendence PDF Author: Alan Liu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226486974
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism—including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory—and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.