Download or read book Contemporary American Fiction in the Embrace of the Digital Age written by Beatrice Pire and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection aims to examine the relationship between American fiction and innovations that marked the first decades of the 21st century: the Internet, social media, smart objects and environments, artificial intelligence, nanotechnologies, genetic engineering and other biotechnologies, transhumanism. These technological innovations redefine the way we live in and imagine our world, interact with each other and understand the human being in his or her ever closer relationship to the machine a human being no longer, as in the past, cared for or repaired, but now enhanced or replaced. What about our artistic and cultural practices? Are these recent advances changing language and literature? How is fiction transformed by technological progress and what representations of progress can it oppose? Can fiction offer a critique of the new media and the upheavals they precipitate? How does the temporality of literature respond to a technical time subjected to the imperative of efficiency, where the present is a slave to the future? Do virtual worlds challenge the primacy of literary fiction as a privileged mode of escape from daily life? In a context where software can generate literary works, can the force of poetical advent still oppose algorithmic logics? What becomes of the body in a world in which its technical extensions increase the externalization of its cognitive functions in media artifacts and digital networks? In order to explore these questions, scholars here investigate the American fiction of Russell Banks, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Tao Lin, Richard Powers, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jennifer Egan or Jonathan Franzen as well as the Cyberpunk genre and the Neuronovel.
Download or read book Hyperobject Reading Scale Variance and American Fiction in the Anthropocene written by Chingshun J. Sheu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-03-25 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a model of reading called hyperobject reading that bridges the Anthropocene scale variance between humans and humanity by focusing on the large-scale problems and phenomena themselves. Hyperobject reading draws on narratology and reader-response theory, as well as newer developments such as the postcritical turn and object-oriented ontology. The theoretical introduction sets out the building blocks of hyperobject reading. Chapter 2 intervenes in critical disability studies and debates about the ecosomatic paradigm; Chapter 3 intervenes in debates about technological evolution, analogue vs. digital subjectivity, and affect theory; and Chapter 4 intervenes in debates about autofiction, contemporary metafiction, and the position and role of the narrator in first-person narratives where the narrator and protagonist can be distinguished. The analytical conclusion sketches the conceptual anatomy of the hyperobject and three possible responses. No part of the Earth today is free from human influence, but literary success suggests effective real-world strategies.
Download or read book The Persistence of the Soul in Literature Art and Politics written by Delphine Louis-Dimitrov and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the evolution of literary and artistic representations of the soul, exploring its development through different time periods. The volume combines literary, aesthetic, ethical, and political considerations of the soul in texts and works of art from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, spanning cultures and schools of thought. Drawing on philosophical, religious and psychological theories of the soul, it emphasizes the far-reaching and enduring epistemological function of the concept in literature, art and politics. The authors argue that the concept of the soul has shaped the understanding of human life and persistently irrigated cultural productions. They show how the concept of soul was explored and redefined by writers and artists, remaining relevant even as it became removed from its ancient or Christian origins.
Download or read book The Digital Literary Sphere written by Simone Murray and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How has the Internet changed literary culture? 2nd Place, N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by The Electronic Literature Organization Reports of the book’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Books are flourishing in the Internet era—widely discussed and reviewed in online readers’ forums and publicized through book trailers and author blog tours. But over the past twenty-five years, digital media platforms have undeniably transformed book culture. Since Amazon’s founding in 1994, the whole way in which books are created, marketed, publicized, sold, reviewed, showcased, consumed, and commented upon has changed dramatically. The digital literary sphere is no mere appendage to the world of print—it is where literary reputations are made, movements are born, and readers passionately engage with their favorite works and authors. In The Digital Literary Sphere, Simone Murray considers the contemporary book world from multiple viewpoints. By examining reader engagement with the online personas of Margaret Atwood, John Green, Gary Shteyngart, David Foster Wallace, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and even Jonathan Franzen, among others, Murray reveals the dynamic interrelationship of print and digital technologies. Drawing on approaches from literary studies, media and cultural studies, book history, cultural policy, and the digital humanities, this book asks: What is the significance of authors communicating directly to readers via social media? How does digital media reframe the “live” author-reader encounter? And does the growing army of reader-reviewers signal an overdue democratizing of literary culture or the atomizing of cultural authority? In exploring these questions, The Digital Literary Sphere takes stock of epochal changes in the book industry while probing books’ and digital media’s complex contemporary coexistence.
Download or read book Radical Change written by Eliza T. Dresang and published by H. W. Wilson. This book was released on 1999 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposing a conceptual framework for evaluating "hand-held" books, Dresang (information studies, Florida State U.) explains how books are changing along with developments in digital information and how librarians, teachers, and parents can recognize and use books to create connections for and among young people using digital concepts and designs that emphasize multilayered, nonlinear stories and information. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book Myth and Fairy Tale in Contemporary Fiction written by Alexandra Cheira and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides more sustained critical attention on the use of myth and fairy tales in contemporary fiction, both stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, the book examines contemporary retellings of myths and fairy tales in a productive dialogue with tradition as an extended appreciation of this productive creative and theoretical dialogue. The individual chapters evince a robust variety of conceptions and approaches, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story and genre, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches. Hence, the volume demonstrates the undeniable importance of myth and fairy tales in contemporary fiction, suggesting questions for future consideration, and hopefully pointing towards new texts and new critical inquiries.
Download or read book Flat World Fiction written by Liliana M. Naydan and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flat-World Fiction analyzes representations of digital technology and the social and ethical concerns it creates in mainstream literary American fiction and fiction written about the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In this period, authors such as Don DeLillo, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mohsin Hamid, Thomas Pynchon, Kristen Roupenian, Gary Shteyngart, and Zadie Smith found themselves not only implicated in the developing digital world of flat screens but also threatened by it, while simultaneously attempting to critique it. As a result, their texts explore how human relationships with digital devices and media transform human identity and human relationships with one another, history, divinity, capitalism, and nationality. Liliana M. Naydan walks us through these complex relationships, revealing how authors show through their fiction that technology is political. In the process, these authors complement and expand on work by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, creating accessible, literary road maps to our digital future.
Download or read book Multimodal Poetics in Contemporary Fiction written by Thomas Mantzaris and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rock Music in American Fiction Writing 1966 2011 written by Martin Moling and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can rock music help us understand literature? Rock Music in American Fiction Writing, 1966-2011 argues that a close analysis of the rock music incorporated into a literary text–an investigation of the lyrics, a musicological exploration of the sounds and rhythms, a cultural-historical inquiry into the production and reception of a song–may yield exciting new insight into and expand our understanding of American literary production from the mid-20th century onwards. Reading major works by Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sherman Alexie and Jennifer Egan from such a rock-musicological vantage point, Rock Music in American Fiction Writing adds a new dimension to recent work in American literary criticism by seeking to establish rock music as an analytical tool for literary investigation. The book concentrates on the way these literary artists have struggled to come to terms with the dichotomies inherent in rock music–its liberating and revolutionary impulses as well as its adherence to the bleakest laws of consumer capitalism–in their work. By combining a musicological with a literary analysis, Rock Music in American Fiction Writing highlights the crucial and complex role rock music has played in shaping the artistic outlook and cultural sensibilities of literary artists since the 1960s in America and beyond.
Download or read book American Revolutions in the Digital Age written by Nora Slonimsky and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The interdisciplinary essays in American Revolutions in the Digital Age explore what digital tools can tell us about the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States and reveal how an understanding of the American past can make sense of our digital present. By employing a host of innovative digital research methods, these authors challenge long-held assumptions about the American past. In addition, this collection uniquely demonstrates how contemporary anxieties about an array of topics, including media disinformation, patriarchy, economic inequality, and public memory, can be better understood through careful considerations of early American history. Open Access edition funded by Iona University
Download or read book Dystopian States of America written by Matthew B. Hill and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dystopian States of America is a crucial resource that studies the impact of dystopian works on American society-including ways in which they reflect our deep and persistent fears about environmental calamities, authoritarian governments, invasive technologies, and human weakness. Dystopian States of America provides students and researchers with an illuminating resource for understanding the impact and relevance of dystopian and apocalyptic works in contemporary American culture. Through its wide survey of dystopian works in numerous forms and genres, the book encourages readers to connect with these works of fiction and understand how the catastrophically grim or disquieting worlds they portray offer insights into our own current situation. In addition to providing more than 150 encyclopedia articles on a large and representative sample of dystopian/apocalyptic narratives in fiction, film, television, and video games (including popular works that often escape critical inquiry), Dystopian States of America features a suite of critical essays on five themes-war, pandemics, totalitarianism, environmental calamity, and technological overreach-that serve as the foundation for most dystopian worlds of the imagination. These offerings complement one another, enabling readers to explore dystopian conceptions of America and the world from multiple perspectives and vantage points.
Download or read book Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age written by Justin St. Clair and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-15 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering both a short history and a theoretical framework, this book is the first extended study of the soundtracked book as a media form. A soundtracked book is a print or digital publication for which a recorded, musical complement has been produced. Early examples were primarily developed for the children's market, but by the middle of the twentieth century, ethnographers had begun producing book-and-record combinations that used print to contextualize musical artifacts. The last half-century has witnessed the rapid expansion of the adult market, including soundtracked novels from celebrated writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Kathy Acker, and Mark Z. Danielewski. While often dismissed as gimmicks, this volume argues that soundtracked books represent an interesting case study in media consumption. Unlike synchronous multimedia forms, the vast majority of soundtracked books require that audience activity be split between reading and listening, thus defining the user experience and often shaping the content of singing books as well. Mapping the form's material evolution, this book charts a previously unconsidered pathway through more than a century of recording formats and packaging strategies, emphasizing the synergies and symbioses that characterize the marriage of sound and print. As such, it will be of value to scholars and postgraduate students working in media studies, literary studies, and sound studies.
Download or read book American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age written by Lucia Ricciardelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age examines the recent challenges to the conventions of realist documentary through the lens of war documentary films by Ken Burns, Michael Moore, and Errol Morris. During the twentieth century, the invention of new technologies of audiovisual representation such as cinema, television, video, and digital media have transformed the modes of historical narration and with it forced historians to assess the impact of new visual technologies on the construction of history. This book investigates the manner in which this contemporary Western "crisis" in historical narrative is produced by a larger epistemological shift in visual culture. Ricciardelli uses the theme of war as depicted in these directors’ films to focus her study and look at the model(s) of national identity that Burns, Morris, and Moore shape through their depictions of US military actions. She examines how postcolonial critiques of historicism and the advent of digitization have affected the narrative structure of documentary film and the shaping of historical consciousness through cinematic representation.
Download or read book Tactics of the Human written by Laura Shackelford and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative literary perspective on emerging digital cultures and how the systems-thinking of Post-World War II information and dynamic systems theory have entered into everyday life and lived space, prompting tactical (re)understandings of the human
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship written by Ingo Berensmeyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-18 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook surveys the state of the art in literary authorship studies. Its 27 original contributions by eminent scholars offer a multi-layered account of authorship as a defining element of literature and culture. Covering a vast chronological range, Part I considers the history of authorship from cuneiform writing to contemporary digital publishing; it discusses authorship in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, early Jewish cultures, medieval, Renaissance, modern, postmodern and Chinese literature. The second part focuses on the place of authorship in literary theory, and on challenges to theorizing literary authorship, such as gender and sexuality, postcolonial and indigenous contexts for writing. Finally, Part III investigates practical perspectives on the topic, with a focus on attribution, anonymity and pseudonymity, plagiarism and forgery, copyright and literary property, censorship, publishing and marketing and institutional contexts.
Download or read book Media Anthropology for the Digital Age written by Anna Cristina Pertierra and published by Polity. This book was released on 2018-01-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of anthropology took a long time to discover the significance of media in modern culture. In this important new book, Anna Pertierra tells the story of how a field - once firmly associated with the study of esoteric cultures - became a central part of the global study of media and communication. She recounts the rise of anthropological studies of media, the discovery of digital cultures, and the embrace of ethnographic methods by media scholars around the world. Bringing together longstanding debates in sociocultural anthropology with recent innovations in digital cultural research, this book explains how anthropology fits into the story and study of media in the contemporary world. It charts the mutual disinterest and subsequent love affair that has taken place between the fields of anthropology and media studies in order to understand how and why such a transformation has taken place. Moreover, the book shows how the theories and methods of anthropology offer valuable ways to study media from a ground-level perspective and to understand the human experience of media in the digital age. Media Anthropology for the Digital Age will be of interest to students and scholars of media and communication, anthropology, and cultural studies, as well as anyone wanting to understand the use of anthropology across wider cultural debates.
Download or read book Hybrid Fictions written by Daniel Grassian and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-09-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1960s, academics have theorized that literature is on its way to becoming obsolete or, at the very least, has lost part of its power as an influential medium of social and cultural critique. This work argues against that misconception and maintains that contemporary American literature is not only alive and well but has grown in significant ways that reflect changes in American culture during the last twenty years. In addition, this work argues that beginning in the 1980s, a new, allied generation of American writers, born from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, has emerged, whose hybrid fiction blend distinct elements of previous American literary movements and contain divided social, cultural and ethnic allegiances. The author explores psychological, philosophical, ethnic and technological hybridity. The author also argues for the importance of and need for literature in contemporary America and considers its future possibilities in the realms of the Internet and hypertext. David Foster Wallace, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland, Sherman Alexie, William Vollmann, Michele Serros and Dave Eggers are among the writers whose hybrid fictions are discussed.
