Download or read book Plots written by Ben Carver and published by Conspiracy Theories. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their 'readers' situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature. This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism.
Download or read book Cults and Conspiracies written by Theodore Ziolkowski and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco's notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact "a secret without content."
Download or read book Conspiracy Literature in Early Renaissance Italy written by Marta Celati and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the topic and treatment of conspiracy in fifteenth-century Italian literature. It situates the theme of conspiracy within the literary and historical contexts of the period, examines its representation within four key texts, and reflects on the legacy of these literary-historical works over the following century.
Download or read book A Culture of Conspiracy written by Michael Barkun and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unravelling the genealogies and permutations of conspiracist worldviews, this work shows how this web of urban legends has spread among sub-cultures on the Internet and through mass media, and how this phenomenon relates to larger changes in American culture.
Download or read book The Republic of Cthulhu written by Eric Wilson and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If parapolitics, a branch of radical criminology that studies the interactions between public entities and clandestine agencies, is to develop as an academic discipline, then it must develop a coherent theory of aesthetics in order to successfully perform its primary function: to render perceptible extra-judicial phenomena that have hitherto resisted formal classification. Wilson offers the work of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) as an example of the relevance of subversive literature-in this case, cosmic horror and the weird tale-to the parapolitical criminologist. Cosmic horror is a form of writing that relies heavily upon the epistemological assumption of a radical and irreconcilable disjunction between appearance and reality, perception and truth. In many ways, the well-constructed weird tale strongly resembles the hard-boiled detective story or the noir thriller in that the resolution of the narrative hinges upon a dramatically shattering confrontation with an unspeakable reality. Apart from its obvious utilization of conspiracy theory, the primary attraction of the Lovecraftian text lies with its remarkably sophisticated utilization of two central tropes of classical aesthetic theory-the sublime and the grotesque. Not only does Lovecraft's oeuvre represent a remarkable use of both of these motifs, but the raw literary power of the Lovecraftian weird tale serves as an outstanding exemplar for the parapolitical scholar to emulate in formulating an alternative mode of discourse, or poetics.
Download or read book Conspiracy Theory in Latin Literature written by Victoria Emma Pagán and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2012-12-15 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conspiracy theory as a theoretical framework has emerged only in the last twenty years; commentators are finding it a productive way to explain the actions and thoughts of individuals and societies. In this compelling exploration of Latin literature, Pagán uses conspiracy theory to illuminate the ways that elite Romans invoked conspiracy as they navigated the hierarchies, divisions, and inequalities in their society. By seeming to uncover conspiracy everywhere, Romans could find the need to crush slave revolts, punish rivals with death or exile, dismiss women, denigrate foreigners, or view their emperors with deep suspicion. Expanding on her earlier Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, Pagán here interprets the works of poets, satirists, historians, and orators—Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, Terence, and Cicero, among others—to reveal how each writer gave voice to fictional or real actors who were engaged in intrigue and motivated by a calculating worldview. Delving into multiple genres, Pagán offers a powerful critique of how conspiracy and conspiracy theory can take hold and thrive when rumor, fear, and secrecy become routine methods of interpreting (and often distorting) past and current events. In Roman society, where knowledge about others was often lacking and stereotypes dominated, conspiracy theory explained how the world worked. The persistence of conspiracy theory, from antiquity to the present day, attests to its potency as a mechanism for confronting the frailties of the human condition.
Download or read book The Van Gogh Conspiracy written by J. Madison Davis and published by ibooks. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In *The Van Gogh Conspiracy,* the discovery of a "new" painting by Van Gogh hidden in the barn of a rural French farmhouse sets the art world spinning. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam authenticates the painting, and the poor French family in whose barn it was discovered stands to collect millions once the painting is auctioned. But a holocaust survivor living in New York claims the painting is actually his, and was stolen from him by the Nazis. He hires a team to help him prove that the "bill of sale" he has in Van Gogh’s handwriting is authentic. The international investigation leads to the discovery of another never-seen-before Van Gogh, and the revelation that someone working in the Van Gogh Museum has access to an entire horde of famous painting stolen by the Nazis during World War II—and has been secretly sending them to former Nazis around the world so that they can sell them at auction and make millions.
Download or read book Truth and Fiction written by Peter Deutschmann and published by Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner. This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many influential conspiracy theories originated in Eastern Europe. This volume analyzes the history behind this widespread phenomenon as well as its relationship with representations of the present in Eastern European cultures and literatures.
Download or read book The Lost Conspiracy written by Frances Hardinge and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On an island of sandy beaches, dense jungles, and slumbering volcanoes, colonists seek to apply archaic laws to a new land, bounty hunters stalk the living for the ashes of their funerary pyres, and a smiling tribe is despised by all as traitorous murderers. It is here, in the midst of ancient tensions and new calamity, that two sisters are caught in a deadly web of deceits. Arilou is proclaimed a beautiful prophetess—one of the island's precious oracles: a Lost. Hathin, her junior, is her nearly invisible attendant. But neither Arilou nor Hathin is exactly what she seems, and they live a lie that is carefully constructed and jealously guarded. When the sisters are unknowingly drawn into a sinister, island-wide conspiracy, quiet, unobtrusive Hathin must journey beyond all she has ever known of her world—and of herself—in a desperate attempt to save them both. As the stakes mount and falsehoods unravel, she discovers that the only thing more dangerous than the secret she hides is the truth she must uncover.
Download or read book Paradigms of Paranoia written by Samuel Coale and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2005-03-20 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popularity of The DaVinci Code exemplifies the fascination Americans have with conspiracy-driven subjects. Samuel Chase Coale reminds us in this book that conspiracy is foundational in American culture - from the apocalyptic Biblical narratives in early Calvinist households to the fear of minority and immigrant populations in the 19th century.
Download or read book Counterfeit Politics written by David Kelman and published by Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Counterfeit Politics, David Kelman reassesses the political significance of conspiracy theory. Traditionally, political theory has sought to banish the "paranoid style" from the "proper" domain of politics. But if conspiracy theory lies outside the sphere of legitimate politics, why do these narratives continue to haunt political life? Counterfeit Politics accounts for the seemingly ineradicable nature of conspiracy theory by arguing that all political statements ultimately take the form of conspiracy theory. Through careful readings of works by Ernest Hemingway, Ricardo Piglia, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Jorge Luis Borges, Ishmael Reed, Jorge Volpi, Rigoberta Menchú, and Ángel Rama, Kelman demonstrates that conspiracy narratives bear witness to an illegitimate or "counterfeit" secret that cannot be fully recognized, understood, and controlled. Even though the secret is not authorized to speak, this "silence" is nevertheless precisely what gives the secret its force. Kelman goes on to suggest that all political statements--even those that do not seem "paranoid"--are constitutively illegitimate or counterfeit, since they always narrate this unresolved play of legitimacy between an official or authorized plot and an unofficial or unauthorized plot (a "complot"). In short, Counterfeit Politics argues that politics only takes place as "conspiracy theory."
Download or read book Cults and Conspiracies written by Theodore Ziolkowski and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco’s notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact “a secret without content.”
Download or read book Plots written by Taylor & Francis Group and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-12 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their 'readers' situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature. This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism.
Download or read book Conspiracy Encyclopedia written by Thom Burnett and published by Franz Steiner Verlag. This book was released on 2006 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conspiracies are everywhere. they are the lifeblood of politics, business and our daily lives. this truly international and all-embracing encyclopedia explains the details of the world's major popular conspiracies, listing them chronologically under subject matter and cross-referencing them continually (because so many conspiracy theories interact on some level). Conspiracies are often international in their sweep and their impact. the brutal stabbing of Julius Caesar (the conspiracy which has defined political assassinations ever since) plunged the Roman Empire into civil war, which then engulfed much of the known western world. More recently the Cambridge spies (Philby, Blunt, MacLean and Burgess) helped Russia throughout WWII and then re-defined the Cold War afterwards, Philby's defection casting a 30-year shadow over CIA/Anglo-American relations. though conspiracies define our everyday lives, there is no body of serious academic research to understand their role, nature or defining characteristics. Most historians prefer to adhere to the cock-up theory of history, in which everything happens by accident or incompetence. Although this view is favoured by academics and historians, it is rejected by a large part of the general public who prefer the evidence of their own lives. However they consume their media, what they see is a mesh of conspiracies that define the texture of their everyday lives, often for the worst. Most people believe that there is a grain of truth in most theories about conspiracies. this book is for them.
Download or read book A Conspiracy of Paper written by David Liss and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2001-01-30 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Weaver, a Jew and an ex-boxer, is an outsider in eighteenth-century London, tracking down debtors and felons for aristocratic clients. The son of a wealthy stock trader, he lives estranged from his family—until he is asked to investigate his father’s sudden death. Thus Weaver descends into the deceptive world of the English stock jobbers, gliding between coffee houses and gaming houses, drawing rooms and bordellos. The more Weaver uncovers, the darker the truth becomes, until he realizes that he is following too closely in his father’s footsteps—and they just might lead him to his own grave. An enthralling historical thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper will leave readers wondering just how much has changed in the stock market in the last three hundred years. . . .
Download or read book Conspiracy Revolution and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel written by Adrian Wisnicki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on critical and theoretical work by Miller, Boone, Foucault, Jameson, and others, as well as cultural history, affect theory, and contemporary psychiatric literature, the author defines and explores what he calls the Victorian "conspiracy narrative tradition"--a tradition which embraces classic Victorian works like Bleak House, Great Expectations, Villette, and The Moonstone, as well as later Victorian and Edwardian novels by James, Conrad, and Chesterton, and early spy thrillers such as The Riddle of the Sands and The Thirty-Nine Steps. In reading these works as instances of a single literary tradition, the conspiracy narrative tradition, the author traces how the representation of conspiracy changes in nineteenth-century British literature and argues that many of these changes occur in response to significant Victorian-era developments, such as the European revolutions of 1848-49, the rise of British law enforcement agencies, the growth of Irish Fenian terrorism, and the fin-de-siècle waning of the British Empire. The book also explores the roles that conspiratorial indeterminacy and irony play in shaping the Victorian conspiracy narrative tradition and examines how modern works by Proust, Kafka, and Pynchon appropriate elements from Victorian conspiracy narratives. Finally, in using recent work on affect theory as well as studies of paranoia by Freud, Shapiro, and Meissner, the book traces how Victorian works fashion the paranoid subject, a discursive process that ultimately leads to the emergence of the modern fictional conspiracy theorist.
Download or read book Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction written by Steffen Hantke and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 1994 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the influence of Thomas Pynchon, a generation of postmodern American writers has explored the theme of conspiracy and paranoia, its origins in contemporary American culture, and its political and ideological ramifications. This intense preoccupation with paranoid forms of conceptual organization has helped critics to represent postmodernism as a coherent phenomenon and define it as a period. While for many readers the assumption of periodic homogeneity is still valid, postmodern fiction has, in fact, been diversifying rapidly in the course of its development over the last 20 years. In the works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy, a new set of narrative premises, which mark a significant paradigmatic shift within postmodern American fiction, has begun to emerge from the dialogic interplay with Pynchonesque paranoia.
