Download or read book Fictional Games written by Stefano Gualeni and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What roles do imaginary games have in story-telling? Why do fiction authors outline the rules of a game that the audience will never play? Combining perspectives from philosophy, literary theory and game studies, this book provides the first in-depth investigation into the significance of fictional games within fictional worlds. Drawing from contemporary cinema and literature, from The Hunger Games to the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone introduce five key functions that different types of imaginary games have in worldbuilding. First, fictional games can emphasize the dominant values and ideologies of the fictional society they belong to. Second, some imaginary games function in fictional worlds as critical, utopian tools, inspiring shifts in the thinking and political orientation of the fictional characters. Third, a few fictional games are conducive to the transcendence of a particular form of being, such as the overcoming of human corporeality. Fourth, imaginary games within works of fiction can deceptively blur the boundaries between the contingency of play and the irrevocable seriousness of “real life”, either camouflaging life as a game or disguising a game as something with more permanent consequences. And fifth, they can function as meta-reflexive tools, suggesting critical and/or satirical perspectives on how actual games are designed, played, sold, manipulated, experienced, understood and utilized as part of our culture. With illustrations in every chapter bringing the imaginary games to life, Gualeni and Fassone creatively inspire us to consider fictional games anew: not as moments of playful reprieve in a storyline, but as significant and multi-layered expressive devices.

Download or read book The Black Imagination Science Fiction and the Speculative written by Sandra Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book expands the discourse as well as the nature of critical commentary on science fiction, speculative fiction and futurism – literary and cinematic by Black writers. The range of topics include the following: black superheroes; issues and themes in selected works by Octavia Butler; selected work of Nalo Hopkinson; the utopian and dystopian impulse in the work of W.E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler; Derrick Bell’s Space Traders; the Star Trek Franchise; female protagonists through the lens of race and gender in the Alien and Predator film franchises; science fiction in the Caribbean Diaspora; commentary on select African films regarding near-future narratives; as well as a science fiction/speculative literature writer’s discussion of why she writes and how. This book was published as a special issue of African Identities: An International Journal.

Download or read book Foundation written by D. G. Leahy and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the ontological and logical foundation of a new form of thinking, the beginning of an “absolute phenomenology.” It does so in the context of the history of thought in Europe and America. It explores the ramifications of a categorically new logic. Thinkers dealt with include Plato, Galileo, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Peirce, James, Dewey, Derrida, McDermott, and Altizer.

Download or read book Race Immigration and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner written by Randy Boyagoda and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-04-02 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read together, novels from a contemporary world writer (Salman Rushdie) and two modern American authors (Faulkner and Ellision) depict a century-long transformation of how American identity and experience have been conceived and imagined; these changes are revealed in the fiction of encounters between immigrants and natives.

Download or read book Foundation Systems for High Rise Structures written by Rolf Katzenbach and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book deals with the geotechnical analysis and design of foundation systems for high-rise buildings and other complex structures with a distinctive soil-structure interaction. The basics of the analysis of stability and serviceability, necessary soil investigations, important technical regulations and quality and safety assurance are explained and possibilities for optimised foundation systems are given. Additionally, special aspects of foundation systems such as geothermal activated foundation systems and the reuse of existing foundations are described and illustrated by examples from engineering practice.

Download or read book A Companion to Sensation Fiction written by Pamela K. Gilbert and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive collection offers a complete introduction to one of the most popular literary forms of the Victorian period, its key authors and works, its major themes, and its lasting legacy. Places key authors and novels in their cultural and historical context Includes studies of major topics such as race, gender, melodrama, theatre, poetry, realism in fiction, and connections to other art forms Contributions from top international scholars approach an important literary genre from a range of perspectives Offers both a pre and post-history of the genre to situate it in the larger tradition of Victorian publishing and literature Incorporates coverage of traditional research and cutting-edge contemporary scholarship

Download or read book Genealogies of Fiction written by Eleonora Stoppino and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso. Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.

Download or read book The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French written by Oana Panaïté and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Colonial Fortune highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue - in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era's concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today's political and cultural conversation, and literature's ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.

Download or read book Mutant Narratives in Ecological Science Fiction written by Kaisa Kortekallio and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using an innovative multidisciplinary approach which is deeply invested in posthumanist thought, this book demonstrates how reading science fiction shapes the way we engage with lived environments. In dialogue with works by widely studied science fiction authors Greg Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer, it draws out how they function as mutant narratives. The first to systematically integrate three fields – feminist posthumanism, cognitive narratology, and science fiction studies – it offers a complex and coherent understanding of readerly experience as material, embodied, dynamic, and imaginative. Covering a range of urgent topics, including climate fiction, New Weird fiction, and new phenomenologies of the body, this book is the first to demonstrate how readerly experience acts as a site for ethical and political reorientation in the time of climate change.

Download or read book Postcolonial Fiction and Sacred Scripture written by Sura Qadiri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Francophone writers from North Africa and the Middle East often choose to write within a sacred context, sometimes engaging directly with Islamist rhetoric. Novelists like Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Amin Maalouf (Lebanon) revisit scripture as a way to convey nuances which they believe have been stamped out by monolithic religious world-views. For them, fiction offers a way to break away from limited exegetical horizons, but to remain within the faith. Others, though, would go further, moving away from all religious practice, not just the excessively political or violent. Tunisian writers Abdelwahab Meddeb and Fethi Benslama propose that all literature is of its very nature outside of religion, and that its proliferation will ultimately lead to a secular society. Qadiri explores this wide spectrum of approaches, not only by draw comparison with metropolitan French thought, but also to assess its potential impact at a time of radical change in the Islamic world. Sura Qadiri is a research associate in the French Department, University of Cambridge."

Download or read book Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban written by James W. Coleman and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Tempest's Caliban, Shakespeare created an archetype in the modern era depicting black men as slaves and savages who threaten civilization. As contemporary black male fiction writers have tried to free their subjects and themselves from this legacy to tell a story of liberation, they often unconsciously retell the story, making their heroes into modern-day Calibans. Coleman analyzes the modern and postmodern novels of John Edgar Wideman, Clarence Major, Charles Johnson, William Melvin Kelley, Trey Ellis, David Bradley, and Wesley Brown. He traces the Caliban legacy to early literary influences, primarily Ralph Ellison, and then deftly demonstrates its contemporary manifestations. This engaging study challenges those who argue for the liberating possibilities of the postmodern narrative, as Coleman reveals the pervasiveness and influence of Calibanic discourse. At the heart of James Coleman's study is the perceived history of the black male in Western culture and the traditional racist stereotypes indigenous to the language. Calibanic discourse, Coleman argues, so deeply and subconsciously influences the texts of black male writers that they are unable to cast off the oppression inherent in this discourse. Coleman wants to change the perception of black male writers' struggle with oppression by showing that it is their special struggle with language. Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban is the first book to analyze a substantial body of black male fiction from a central perspective.

Download or read book The Science Fiction of Sex written by Annie Potts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can we learn from exploring the differences in male and female orgasmic experience? Is the penis an entity with a mind of its own? These issues and others, such as the popular portrayals of male sexuality as active and outwardly focused and female sexuality as passive and internally located, are discussed in The Science/Fiction of Sex. Contemporary feminist and poststructuralist theories of sex and gender are explored alongside an investigation of how people make sense of such concepts as heterosexuality, orgasm, sexual dysfunction, femininity and masculinity, and safer sex practice. Potts asks men and women about their actual experiences of heterosex. This interview material, combined with excerpts from sexological and medical texts and features from film and television, draws attention to the ways in which western cultural constructs influence our ideas and experiences of the body, sex, and gender. Potts also uses deconstructive theory as a textual tool, concentrating on how binary oppositions such as inside/outside and mind/body impact on our understandings of heterosex, and affect the power relations between women and men. She also examines how the radical postmodern theories of the body and sexuality proposed by Irigaray, Lyotard, and Deleuze and Guattari disrupt such dualistic modes of understanding and experiencing sexualized bodies. The Science/Fiction of Sex will be of interest to those studying women and psychology as well as gender studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, sociology, philosophy, public health and education.

Download or read book Heterotopic World Fiction written by Lesley Higgins and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After more than a century of genocides and in the midst of a global pandemic, this book focuses on the critique of biopolitics (the government of life through individuals and the general population) and the counterdevelopment of biopoetics (an aesthetics of life elaborating a self as a practice of freedom) realized in texts by Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje. Their world fiction produces transhistorical, transnational experiences offered to the reader for collective responsibility in these critical times. Their books function as heterotopias: spaces and processes that recall and confront regimes of recognized truths to dismantle fixed identities and actualize possibilities for becoming other. Higgins and Leps define and explore a slant, biopoetic perspective that is feminist, materialist, anti-racist, and anti-war.

Download or read book Contemporary Pakistani Speculative Fiction and the Global Imaginary written by Shazia Sadaf and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first book-length study of emergent Pakistani speculative fiction written in English, this critical work explores the ways in which contemporary Pakistani authors extend the genre in new directions by challenging the cognitive majoritarianism (usually Western) in this field. Responding to the recent Afro science fiction movement that has spurred non-Western writers to seek a democratization of the broader genre of speculative fiction, Pakistani writers have incorporated elements from djinn mythology, Qur'anic eschatology, "Desi" (South Asian) traditions, local folklore, and Islamic feminisms in their narratives to encourage familiarity with alternative world views. In five chapters, this book analyzes fiction by several established Pakistani authors as well as emerging writers to highlight the literary value of these contemporary works in reconciling competing cognitive approaches, blurring the dividing line between "possibilities" and "impossibilities" in envisioning humanity’s collective future, and anticipating the future of human rights in these envisioned worlds.

Download or read book Literary Reimaginings of Argentina s Independence written by Catriona McAllister and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-05 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. As the moment of the birth of the patria, Independence enjoys a privileged role in the historical imaginary of many Latin American nations. In Argentina as in other countries, the period has been fundamental to state discourses of nation-building and identity, lending its figures and central narratives a powerful symbolic function. It has also attracted significant literary attention, and this book offers an innovative reading of texts that provide irreverent, metafictional, or self-reflexive retellings of this foundational moment. This type of fiction is usually read through well-established frameworks on the contemporary Latin American historical novel that emphasise its destabilising of knowledge and single truths. Instead, this work foregrounds the much more immediate, concrete political points at stake when we read these texts through both their direct engagement with contemporary circumstances and the politics of the history they evoke. It therefore argues for a new approach to reading contemporary Latin American historical fiction that showcases its response to politically urgent questions.

Download or read book Heroes and Heroism in British Fiction Since 1800 written by Barbara Korte and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about the manifestations and explorations of the heroic in narrative literature since around 1800. It traces the most important stages of this representation but also includes strands that have been marginalised or silenced in a dominant masculine and higher-class framework - the studies include explorations of female versions of the heroic, and they consider working-class and ethnic perspectives. The chapters in this volume each focus on a prominent conjuncture of texts, histories and approaches to the heroic. Taken together, they present an overview of the ‘literary heroic’ in fiction since the late eighteenth century.

Download or read book Migrant Frontiers written by Anna Tybinko and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-16 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines today’s massive migrations between Global South and Global North in light of Spain and Portugal’s complicated colonial legacies. It offers unique material on Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa in conjunction to transatlantic and transpacific perspectives encompassing the Americas, Asia, and the Caribbean. For the first time, these are brought together to explore how movement within and beyond these former metropoles came to define the Iberian Peninsula. The collection is composed of papers that study human mobility in Spanish-speaking or Lusophone contexts from a myriad of approaches. The project thus sheds critical light on migratory movement within the Luso-Hispanic world, and also beyond its traditional geo-linguistic parameters, through an eclectic and inter-disciplinary collection of essays, traversing anthropology, literary studies, theater, and popular culture. Beyond focusing solely on the geo-political limits of Peninsular space, several essays interrogate the legacies of Iberian colonial projects in a global perspective, and how the discursive underpinnings of these impact the politics of migration in the broader Luso-Hispanic world.