Download or read book Analog Fictions for the Digital Age written by Julia Breitbach and published by Camden House. This book was released on 2012 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how current photographic discourse can illuminate the analysis of recent literary realism and proposes a truly original photographic hermeneutics for literary study. Both realist, post-postmodernist aesthetics in the twenty-first century and the legacy of analog photography in its recent digital incarnation depend on an aesthetics of trust and a sense of contingent referentiality. Julia Breitbach's innovative study demonstrates how current photographic discourse may be used as an illuminating critical idiom for the analysis of recent forms of literary realism, thus proposing a photographic hermeneutics for the study ofliterature. Along with a thorough critical investigation of both fields, Breitbach offers a pioneering theoretical exploration of analog and digital photography based on recent "thing theory," which she then applies to in-depth analyses of realist aesthetics in selected post-millennial novels by Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje, and Ali Smith, yielding fresh perspectives on the remediation between photography and literature in the twenty-first century. An original contribution to the study of contemporary Anglophone literatures with an interdisciplinary appeal, this study will be of interest especially to scholars and students in Anglophone literary studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and media studies. Julia Breitbach is Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

Download or read book Analog Church written by Jay Y. Kim and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As our culture begins to reckon with the limits of a digital world, it's time for the church to do the same. In our efforts to stay relevant in our digital age, have we begun to move away from transcendence? Pastor Jay Kim grapples with the ramifications of a digital church, from worship and Christian community to how we engage Scripture.

Download or read book The Girls With Kaleidoscope Eyes written by Howard V. Hendrix and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging from flash to full novella lengths, the ten pieces featured here include stories about time travel and the 1939 World's Fair, a tendentious man/dog relationship on Mars, a spam-blocker program that incidentally shuts down the universe, giant artworks among the nearly immortal, Einstein channeled by a fortune teller, Big Data meets March Madness, and enhanced bonobos trying to re-create Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio. Hendrix's stories transcend time and show us the futures the human race yet may face, in the digital age and beyond.

Download or read book The Revenge of Analog written by David Sax and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top ten books of 2016 A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again. Behold the Revenge of Analog. David Sax has uncovered story after story of entrepreneurs, small business owners, and even big corporations who've found a market selling not apps or virtual solutions but real, tangible things. As e-books are supposedly remaking reading, independent bookstores have sprouted up across the country. As music allegedly migrates to the cloud, vinyl record sales have grown more than ten times over the past decade. Even the offices of tech giants like Google and Facebook increasingly rely on pen and paper to drive their brightest ideas. Sax's work reveals a deep truth about how humans shop, interact, and even think. Blending psychology and observant wit with first-rate reportage, Sax shows the limited appeal of the purely digital life-and the robust future of the real world outside it.

Download or read book The New Analog written by Damon Krukowski and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of 2017 "This is not a book about why vinyl sounds better; it's way more interesting than that . . . it] is full of things I didn't know, like why people yell into cellphones . . . Ultimately, it's about how we consume sound as a society - which is, increasingly, on an individual basis." --NPR "If you're a devoted music fan who's dubious about both rosy nostalgia and futuristic utopianism, Damon Krukowski's The New Analog is for you." --The New York Times Book Review "A pointedly passionate look at what's been lost in the digital era." --Los Angeles Times What John Berger did to ways of seeing, well-known indie musician Damon Krukowski does to ways of listening in this lively guide to the transition from analog to digital culture Having made his name in the late 1980s as a member of the indie band Galaxie 500, Damon Krukowski has watched cultural life lurch from analog to digital. And as an artist who has weathered the transition, he has challenging, urgent questions for both creators and consumers about what we have thrown away in the process: Are our devices leaving us lost in our own headspace even as they pinpoint our location? Does the long reach of digital communication come at the sacrifice of our ability to gauge social distance? Do streaming media discourage us from listening closely? Are we hearing each other fully in this new environment? Rather than simply rejecting the digital disruption of cultural life, Krukowski uses the sound engineer's distinction of signal and noise to reexamine what we have lost as a technological culture, looking carefully at what was valuable in the analog realm so we can hold on to it. Taking a set of experiences from the production and consumption of music that have changed since the analog era--the disorientation of headphones, flattening of the voice, silence of media, loudness of mastering, and manipulation of time--as a basis for a broader exploration of contemporary culture, Krukowski gives us a brilliant meditation and guide to keeping our heads amid the digital flux. Think of it as plugging in without tuning out.

Download or read book The Analogue Revolution written by Simon Webb and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2018-05-30 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are all familiar with the digital revolution that has swept across the developed world in recent years. It has ushered in an age of smartphones, laptop computers and ready access to the internet. A little over a century ago, a similar explosion took place in the field of information and communication technology. This revolution was not digital but analogue, and it saw the birth of mass media such as newspapers, cinema and radio.In The Analogue Revolution, Simon Webb examines the impact that developments in printing, photography, wireless telegraphy, gramophones and moving pictures had in the years preceding the First World War, and shows how the modern world was shaped by the media used to record it. From the first mass-circulation newspapers to cameras so cheap that everybody could afford them, from early experiments in radio broadcasting to cinema films in color, The Analogue Revolution charts the history of the first information revolution of the twentieth century. The parallels with the modern world are uncanny, ranging from anxiety about the use of new technology to distribute pornography, to worries about children losing interest in reading because they prefer to watch films.For anybody wishing to understand the modern world, this book is an essential primer in the nature of information revolutions and the way in which they affect the world.

Download or read book To the Digital Age written by Ross Knox Bassett and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-02-22 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor is the fundamental element of digital electronics. The tens of millions of transistors in a typical home -- in personal computers, automobiles, appliances, and toys -- are almost all derive from MOS transistors. To the Digital Age examines for the first time the history of this remarkable device, which overthrew the previously dominant bipolar transistor and made digital electronics ubiquitous. Combining technological with corporate history, To the Digital Age examines the breakthroughs of individual innovators as well as the research and development power (and problems) of large companies such as IBM, Intel, and Fairchild. Bassett discusses how the MOS transistor was invented but spurned at Bell Labs, and then how, in the early 1960s, spurred on by the possibilities of integrated circuits, RCA, Fairchild, and IBM all launched substantial MOS R & D programs. The development of the MOS transistor involved an industry-wide effort, and Bassett emphasizes how communication among researchers from different firms played a critical role in advancing the new technology. Bassett sheds substantial new light on the development of the integrated circuit, Moore's Law, the success of Silicon Valley start-ups as compared to vertically integrated East Coast firms, the development of the microprocessor, and IBM's multi-billion-dollar losses in the early 1990s. To the Digital Age offers a captivating account of the intricate R & D process behind a technological device that transformed modern society.

Download or read book Contemporary Fictions of Attention written by Alice Bennett and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the supposed shortening of our attention spans, what future is there for fiction in the age of the internet? Contemporary Fictions of Attention rejects this discourse of distraction-crisis which suggests that the future of reading is in peril, and instead finds that contemporary writers construct 'fictions of attention' that find some value in states or moments of inattention. Through discussion of work by a diverse selection of writers, including Joshua Cohen, Ben Lerner, Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace, this book identifies how fiction prompts readers to become peripherally aware of their own attention. Contemporary Fictions of Attention locates a common interest in attention within 21st-century fiction and connects this interest to a series of debates surrounding ethics, temporality, the everyday, boredom, work, and self-discipline in contemporary culture.

Download or read book Finance Fictions written by Arne De Boever and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity? Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Twenty first century fiction written by Daniel Lea and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-21 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers readings of five of the most interesting and original voices to have emerged in Britain since the millennium as they tackle the challenges of portraying the new century. Through close readings of the work of Ali Smith, Andrew O'Hagan, Tom McCarthy, Sarah Hall and Jon McGregor, Daniel Lea opens a window onto the formal and thematic concerns that characterise a literary landscape troubled by both familiar and unfamiliar predicaments. These include questions about the meaning of humanness in an age of digital intercourse; about the need for a return to authenticity in the wake of postmodernism; and about the dislocation of self from the other under neoliberal individualism. By relating its readings of these authors to the wider shifts in contemporary literary criticism, this book offers in-depth analysis of important landmarks of recent fiction and an introduction to the challenges of understanding the literature of our time.

Download or read book Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen s Shorter Fiction written by Heather Levy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction: Dead Reckoning focuses on Elizabeth Bowen's representations of violence against the self and others. Heather Levy examines the complicity of landscape and the implications of mayhem, murder, and suicide in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (2006) edited by Angus Wilson and The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008) edited by Alan Hepburn. It introduces five previously unpublished short story fragments and two nearly complete stories from The Elizabeth Bowen Collection at The Harry Ransom Research Center. Levy argues that Bowen's shorter fiction is a quixotic celebration of moral transgression, crime without punishment, and suicide without mourners. Bowen's compassionate response to offenders and violence anticipated the Perpetrator Trauma movement in the United States. Her innovations with the freedom of the short story produced an uncanny narration of violence. This book integrates the entirety of the scholarship on Bowen's short stories in a clear and original manner and offers a synthetic and compelling excavation of Bowen's unpublished short stories.

Download or read book Book Presence in a Digital Age written by Kiene Brillenburg Wurth and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially. Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.

Download or read book The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism written by Mary K. Holland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature has never looked weirder--full of images, colors, gadgets, and footnotes, and violating established norms of character, plot, and narrative structure. Yet over the last 30 years, critics have coined more than 20 new “realisms” in their attempts to describe it. What makes this decidedly unorthodox literature “realistic”? And if it is, then what does “realism” mean anymore? Examining literature by dozens of writers, and over a century of theory and criticism about realism, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism sorts through the current critical confusion to illustrate how our ideas about what is real and how best to depict it have changed dramatically, especially in recent years. Along the way, Mary K. Holland guides the reader on a lively tour through the landscape of contemporary literary studies--taking in metafiction, ideology, posthumanism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism--with forays into quantum mechanics, new materialism, and Buddhism as well, to give us entirely new ways of viewing how humans use language to make sense of--and to make--the world.

Download or read book Contemporary Indian English Literature written by Cecile Sandten and published by Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary Indian English Literature focuses on the recent history of Indian literature in English since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981), a watershed moment for Indian writing in English in the global literary landscape. The chapters in this volume consider a wide range of poets, novelists, short fiction writers and dramatists who have notably contributed to the proliferation of Indian literature in English from the late 20th century to the present. The volume provides an introduction to current developments in Indian English literature and explains general ideas, as well as the specific features and styles of selected writers from this wide spectrum. It addresses students working in this field at university level, and includes thorough reading lists and study questions to encourage students to read, reflect on and write about Indian English literature critically.

Download or read book Realist Critiques of Visual Culture written by Edward Barnaby and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation visible to us? This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements. Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures. By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience.

Download or read book Do You Want to Be Happy and Write written by Robert Lecker and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ondaatje has achieved international prominence and recognition in a way that few other writers have, let alone Canadian writers. This popularity is most pronounced for works of historical fiction such as The English Patient, winner of the Golden Man Booker Prize, and In the Skin of a Lion, set in 1930s Toronto, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and winner of the Canada Reads competition in 2002. But Ondaatje has been writing for over fifty years, and his innovative works include some of the most accomplished poetry in the English-speaking world. Taking its title from a question in his poem “Tin Roof,” Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? reassesses Ondaatje’s writing and the role of the poet, from his troubled explorations of the self-reflexive artist to his most recent novels. Comprehensive in both approach and coverage, this new collection offers groundbreaking analysis informed by an understanding of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre, placing early poetry collections like The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do alongside the full range of his novels and his extensive work as a literary editor. The book highlights the transnational, postcolonial, and diasporic issues that have become increasingly apparent in Ondaatje’s work. Contributors explore key interests that have reappeared and been rethought across his fiction and poetry: the construction of identity; the nature of memory and its relation to family origins and history; the human body as a site of contestation and struggle; the contrast between Eastern and Western values and the Southeast Asian diaspora; the writer’s responsibility in depictions of war, psychic trauma, and genocide; and an ongoing fascination with the visual and the media of photography and film. An eclectic celebration of an iconic author, Do You Want to Be Happy and Write? offers an authoritative reference point for scholars and students of literature and reveals new facets of a major author to his readers around the world.

Download or read book Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age written by C. Henseler and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-10-24 with total page 509 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book applies theoretical models that reflect the mediated, hybrid, and nomadic global scenes within which GenX artists and writers live, think, and work. Henseler touches upon critical insights in comparative media studies, cultural studies, and social theory, and uses sidebars to travel along multiple voices, facts, figures, and faces.