Alien Chic

Alien Chic PDF Author: Neil Badmington
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415310239
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
From The War of the Worlds, Mars Attacks!, Mission to Mars and Independence Day; Neil Badmington explores our relationship with aliens and how thinkers such as Descartes, Barthes, Freud, Lyotard and Derrida have conceptualised what it means to be human (and post-human).

Alien Chic

Alien Chic PDF Author: Neil Badmington
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415310239
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
From The War of the Worlds, Mars Attacks!, Mission to Mars and Independence Day; Neil Badmington explores our relationship with aliens and how thinkers such as Descartes, Barthes, Freud, Lyotard and Derrida have conceptualised what it means to be human (and post-human).

Citizen Science Fiction

Citizen Science Fiction PDF Author: Jerome Winter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793621489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
Citizen Science Fiction argues that science-fiction literature and media can engage and empower individuals to become active and critical participants in citizen science such that they can collaborate meaningfully in the scientific and technological communities, institutions, and industries that deeply shape their everyday lives.

Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson

Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson PDF Author: John L. Steadman
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1789045118
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
H. P. Lovecraft’s aliens are extra-terrestrial, terrestrial & trans-dimensional entities, totally unlike any other aliens in science fiction literature. In contrast, Isaac Asimov's and William Gibson’s aliens are human created positronic robots and virtual reality constructs, or 'idols'. Lovecraft’s great theme is alien indifferentism, tinged with a malevolence that escalates into an existential, apocalyptic threat against humankind, while for Asimov and Gibson, alien inclusionism is the norm. The robots and the VR idols integrate into society and their influence appears to be beneficial. But this is only on the surface. In this book, John L. Steadman demonstrates that there is ultimately little difference between alien indifferentism and alien inclusionism in the fictional works of these three great writers. For in fact, the robots and the VR idols evolve into monsters whose actions bring about outcomes which are every bit as terrifying as anything in Lovecraft’s work. Humans tend to be isolates ('alien'-ated). The reader is invited to question this, and to consider the possibility that an alien perspective, or platform, might, perhaps, be crucial if we intend on seeing ourselves clearly and understanding exactly what it means to be human.

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism

Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism PDF Author: E. Gomel
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137367636
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism offers a typology of alien encounters and addresses a range of texts including classic novels of alien encounter by H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein; recent blockbusters by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler and Sheri Tepper; and experimental science fiction by Peter Watts and Housuke Nojiri.

Alien Ocean

Alien Ocean PDF Author: Stefan Helmreich
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520942604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Alien Ocean immerses readers in worlds being newly explored by marine biologists, worlds usually out of sight and reach: the deep sea, the microscopic realm, and oceans beyond national boundaries. Working alongside scientists at sea and in labs in Monterey Bay, Hawai'i, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the Sargasso Sea and at undersea volcanoes in the eastern Pacific, Stefan Helmreich charts how revolutions in genomics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing have pressed marine biologists to see the sea as animated by its smallest inhabitants: marine microbes. Thriving in astonishingly extreme conditions, such microbes have become key figures in scientific and public debates about the origin of life, climate change, biotechnology, and even the possibility of life on other worlds.

Aliens in Popular Culture

Aliens in Popular Culture PDF Author: Michael M. Levy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
An indispensable resource, this book provides wide coverage on aliens in fiction and popular culture. The wide impact that the imagined alien has had upon Western culture has not been surveyed before; in many cases the essays in Aliens in Popular Culture are the first written on the topic. The book is a compendium of short entries on notable uses of aliens in popular culture across different media and platforms by almost 90 researchers in the field. It covers science fiction from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century, including books, films, television, comics, games, and even advertisements. Individual essays point to the ways in which the imagined alien can be seen as a reflection of different fears and tensions within society, above all in the Anglo-American world. The book additionally provides an overview for context and suggestions for further reading. All varieties of readers will find it to be a comprehensive reference about the extra-terrestrial in popular culture.

What is Posthumanism?

What is Posthumanism? PDF Author: Cary Wolfe
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816666148
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.

The Resonance of Unseen Things

The Resonance of Unseen Things PDF Author: Susan Lepselter
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047290065X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows how multiple troubled histories—of race, class, gender, and power—become compressed into stories of uncanny memory. “We really don’t have anything like this in terms of a focused, sympathetic, open-minded ethnographic study of UFO experiencers. . . . The author’s semiotic approach to the paranormal is immensely productive, positive, and, above all, resonant with what actually happens in history.” —Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University “Lepselter relates a weave of intimate alien sensibilities in out-off-the-way places which are surprisingly, profoundly, close to home. Readers can expect to share her experience of contact with complex logics of feeling, and to do so in a contemporary America they may have thought they understood.” —Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College “An original and beautifully written study of contemporary American cultural poetics. . . . The book convincingly brings into relief the anxieties of those at the margins of American economic and civic life, their perceptions of state power, and the narrative continuities that bond them to histories of violence and expansion in the American West.” —Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan

Television and Youth Culture

Television and Youth Culture PDF Author: J. jagodzinski
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781403976482
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This book explores youth in postmodern society through a Lacanian lens. Jagodzinski explores the generalized paranoia that pervades the landscape of television. Instead of dismissing paranoia as a negative development, he claims that youth today labour within the context of paranoia to find their identities.

Space Oddities

Space Oddities PDF Author: Marie Lathers
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 144117205X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A fascinating new perspective on the Space Race combining brilliant film scholarship with gender studies and feminist theory.