The Holodeck in the Garden

The Holodeck in the Garden PDF Author: Peter Freese
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature. Contributors include Michael Berube writing on Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist; Joseph Conte on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; David Cowart on Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis; Carl Djerassi on science-in-fiction; N. Katherine Hayles on Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; Ursula Heise on risk and narrative in the contemporary novel; John Johnston on network theory; Brian McHale on Harry Mathews, Kathy Acker, and Gilbert Sorrentino; Joseph Tabbi on William Gaddis; and Curtis White on the "Great American Disaster Machine."

The Holodeck in the Garden

The Holodeck in the Garden PDF Author: Peter Freese
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Get Book Here

Book Description
Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature. Contributors include Michael Berube writing on Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist; Joseph Conte on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; David Cowart on Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis; Carl Djerassi on science-in-fiction; N. Katherine Hayles on Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; Ursula Heise on risk and narrative in the contemporary novel; John Johnston on network theory; Brian McHale on Harry Mathews, Kathy Acker, and Gilbert Sorrentino; Joseph Tabbi on William Gaddis; and Curtis White on the "Great American Disaster Machine."

The Holodeck in the Garden

The Holodeck in the Garden PDF Author: Peter Freese
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Collecting twenty essays written by distinguished scholars from the United States and Germany, The Holodeck in the Garden offers an informative tour of the complex interrelations between science, technology, and contemporary American literature. Contributors include Michael Berube writing on Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist; Joseph Conte on William Gibson and Bruce Sterling; David Cowart on Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis; Carl Djerassi on science-in-fiction; N. Katherine Hayles on Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon; Ursula Heise on risk and narrative in the contemporary novel; John Johnston on network theory; Brian McHale on Harry Mathews, Kathy Acker, and Gilbert Sorrentino; Joseph Tabbi on William Gaddis; and Curtis White on the "Great American Disaster Machine."

William Gibson

William Gibson PDF Author: Tom Henthorne
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786486937
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
William Gibson, author of the cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer (1984), is one today's most widely read science fiction writers. This companion is meant both for general readers and for scholars interested in Gibson's oeuvre. In addition to providing a literary and cultural context for works ranging from Gibson's first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977), to his recent, bestselling novel, Zero History (2010), the companion offers commentary on Gibson's subjects, themes, and approaches. It also surveys existing scholarship on Gibson's work in an accessible way and provides an extensive bibliography to facilitate further study of William Gibson's writing, influence, and place in the history of science fiction and in literature as a whole.

The Allure of Machinic Life

The Allure of Machinic Life PDF Author: John Johnston
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262101262
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
An account of the creation of new forms of life and intelligence in cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence that analyzes both the similarities and the differences among these sciences in actualizing life.The Allure of Machinic Life

The Enchantments of Technology

The Enchantments of Technology PDF Author: Lee Bailey
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252090446
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In The Enchantments of Technology, Lee Worth Bailey erases the conventional distinction between myth and machine in order to explore the passionate foundations concealed in technological culture and address its complex ethical, moral and social implications. Bailey argues that technological society does not simply disenchant the world with its reductive methods and mechanical metaphors, then shape machines with political motives, but is also borne by a deeper, subversive undertow of enchantment. Addressing examples to explore the complexities of these enchantments, his thought is full of illuminating examinations of seductively engaging technologies ranging from the old camera obscura to new automobiles, robots, airplanes, and spaceships. This volume builds on the work of numerous scholars, including Jacques Ellul and Jean Brun on the phenomenological and spiritual aspects of technology, Carl Jung on the archetypal collective unconscious approach to myth, and Martin Heidegger on Being itself. Bailey creates a dynamic, interdisciplinary, postmodern examination of how our machines and their environments embody not only reason, but also desires.

Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places

Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places PDF Author: Deborah Levy
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
ISBN: 9781564783332
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
This collection explores the emptiness at the center of the characters' lives and their attempts to fill this lack. In these stories about friendship, motherhood, and the search for enduring love, rules about decency and kindness are broken and repaired as men and women attempt to achieve an elusive sense of fulfillment.

Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism

Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism PDF Author: Stephen J. Burn
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441191240
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Narrative and Becoming

Narrative and Becoming PDF Author: Ridvan Askin
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474414583
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
What is narrative? Ridvan Askin brings together aesthetics, contemporary North American fiction, Gilles Deleuze, narrative theory and the recent speculative turn to answer this question. Through this process, he develops a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative. Askin argues against the established consensus of narrative theory for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman, unconscious and expressive.

Beyond Cyberpunk

Beyond Cyberpunk PDF Author: Graham J. Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136973184
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book is a collection of essays that considers the continuing cultural relevance of the cyberpunk genre into the new millennium. Cyberpunk is no longer an emergent phenomenon, but in our digital age of CGI-driven entertainment, the information economy, and globalized capital, we have never more been in need of a fiction capable of engaging with a world shaped by information technology. The essays in explore our cyberpunk realities to soberly reconsider Eighties-era cyberpunk while also mapping contemporary cyberpunk. The contributors seek to move beyond the narrow strictures of cyberpunk as defined in the Eighties and contribute to an ongoing discussion of how to negotiate exchanges among information technologies, global capitalism, and human social existence. The essays offer a variety of perspectives on cyberpunk’s diversity and how this sub-genre remains relevant amidst its transformation from a print fiction genre into a more generalized set of cultural practices, tackling the question of what it is that cyberpunk narratives continue to offer us in those intersections of literary, cultural, theoretical, academic, and technocultural environments.

Conversations with William Gibson

Conversations with William Gibson PDF Author: Patrick A. Smith
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626740933
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
“After reading Neuromancer for the first time,” literary scholar Larry McCaffery wrote, “I knew I had seen the future of [science fiction] (and maybe of literature in general), and its name was William Gibson.” McCaffery was right. Gibson's 1984 debut is one of the most celebrated SF novels of the last half century, and in a career spanning more than three decades, the American-Canadian science fiction writer and reluctant futurist responsible for introducing “cyberspace” into the lexicon has published nine other novels. Editor Patrick A. Smith draws the twenty-three interviews in this collection from a variety of media and sources—print and online journals and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs, and podcasts. Myriad topics include Gibson's childhood in the American South and his early adulthood in Canada, with travel in Europe; his chafing against the traditional SF mold, the origins of “cyberspace,” and the unintended consequences (for both the author and society) of changing the way we think about technology; the writing process and the reader's role in a new kind of fiction. Gibson (b. 1948) takes on branding and fashion, celebrity culture, social networking, the post-9/11 world, future uses of technology, and the isolation and alienation engendered by new ways of solving old problems. The conversations also provide overviews of his novels, short fiction, and nonfiction.