The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction PDF Author: Elissa Marder
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082324055X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.

The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction PDF Author: Elissa Marder
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082324055X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction PDF Author: Pamela Caughie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135650861
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon

Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction PDF Author: Judd Trichter
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 125003602X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Set in a near-future LA, a man falls in love with a beautiful android—but when she is kidnapped and sold piecemeal on the black market, he must track down her parts to put her back together. Bad luck for Eliot Lazar, he fell in love with an android, a beautiful C-900 named Iris Matsuo. That's the kind of thing that can get you killed in late 21th century Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter – anywhere except the man-made island of Avernus, far out in the Pacific, which is where Eliot and Iris are headed once they get their hands on a boat. But then one night Eliot knocks on Iris's door only to find she was kidnapped, chopped up, sold for parts. Unable to move on and unwilling to settle for a woman with a heartbeat, Eliot vows to find the parts to put Iris back together again—and to find the sonofabitch who did this to her and get his revenge. With a determined LAPD detective on his trail and time running out in a city where machines and men battle for control, Eliot Lazar embarks on a bloody journey that will take him to the edge of a moral precipice from which he can never return, from which mankind can never return. Judd Trichter's Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a science fiction love story that asks the question, how far will you go to save someone you love?

The Theorist's Mother

The Theorist's Mother PDF Author: Andrew Parker
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082235232X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
Andrew Parker undertakes a critical reconsideration of the frequently absent, or troubled, figure of the mother in theorists including Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida.

Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance

Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance PDF Author: Cecily Devereux
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1771125888
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance situates the 1908 dance craze, which The New York Times called “Salomania,” as a crucial event and a turning point in the history of the modern business of erotic dance. Framing Salomania with reference to imperial ideologies of motherhood and race, it works toward better understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This study turns critical attention to cultures of maternity in the late 19th century, primarily with reference to the ways in which women are defined in relation to their genitals as patriarchal property and space and are valued according to reproduction as their primary labour. Erotic dance as it takes shape in the modern representation of Salome insists both that the mother is and is not visible in the body of the dancer, a contradiction this study characterizes as reproductive fetishism. Looking at a range of media, the study traces the modern figure of Salome through visual art, writing, early psychoanalysis and dance, from "hootchie kootch" to the performances dancer Maud Allan called “mimeo-dramatic” to mid-20th-century North American films such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Charles Lamont's Salome, Where She Danced to the 21st-century HBO series The Sopranos.

Perishability Fatigue

Perishability Fatigue PDF Author: Vincent Bruyere
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547943
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault project is an arctic archive designed to preserve the world’s agricultural biodiversity. What do it and other novel forms of storage tell us about our relationship to the future in a time of resource depletion and extinction scenarios? In this innovative book, Vincent Bruyere offers an invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens: the difference between storage and burial in the age of sustainability science. Perishability Fatigue considers questions of permanence and the potentiality of retrieval, noting the tensions within our collective sense of time and finitude. Bruyere reflects on the nature and significance of perishability, asking what it means to have one’s sense of temporality engendered by seed banks and frozen embryo storage, genetically modified organisms and the “de-extinction” of species, nuclear-waste repositories, oncology, and palliative care. He draws attention to the scripts and scenarios that mediate our relations to loss and decay, preservation and conservation, emphasizing the inequalities implicit in technologies of perishability, which promise continuity in the future to some while refusing it to others. A highly interdisciplinary study, Perishability Fatigue reframes the environmental humanities and humanistic inquiry into sustainability science by developing a new language to commemorate fatigue and transience in a culture of preparedness and survival.

Mind the Ghost

Mind the Ghost PDF Author: Sonja Stojanovic
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800854897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal PDF Author: James Martell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429575254
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

Poetics and the Gift

Poetics and the Gift PDF Author: Adam R. Rosenthal
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474488404
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a new interpretation of Derrida’s writings on the gift, Adam R. Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry’s most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination, in genius, inspiration, and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones. By way of his original reading of Derrida’s work in Given Time and ‘Economimesis’, Rosenthal offers a novel account of ‘gift poetics’ and a new understanding of what makes poetry ‘poetry’.

On the Sovereignty of Mothers

On the Sovereignty of Mothers PDF Author: Gil Anidjar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231561288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 75

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Book Description
Paternal, patriarchal, and fraternal concepts, metaphors, and images have long dominated thinking about politics. But the political, Gil Anidjar argues, has always been maternal. In a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract, this book places mothers and mothering at the crux of political thought. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, showing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time. And maternal power is also power over life and death, as he reveals through a nuanced consideration of abortion. Through the concept of the maternal, Anidjar offers new insights into abiding sources from the Bible and ancient Greece to classical and modern political philosophy—the story of Hagar and Sarah, Oedipus and his two mothers, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave—reinterpreted in light of Black and feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and autotheoretical reflection. Elegantly written and provocative, On the Sovereignty of Mothers offers the maternal as a new frame for understanding the political order.