Download or read book Orange Is the New Black and Philosophy written by Richard Greene and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2015-08-17 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of eighteen chapters by talented philosophical minds probes some of the many lessons to be learned from Orange Is the New Black (mostly the addictive Netflix comedy-drama but with some attention to the best-selling real-life book by Piper Kerman). The show and the book that inspired it both dramatically highlight the troubling, stressful situation of millions of incarcerated Americans. How do the show’s shower scenes shed light on the classical mind-body problem? How can we make our lives meaningful when our options are curtailed by authority? What does it mean to manipulate someone, and why is it bad? What can we learn about the peculiarity of human beliefs from Pennsatucky’s notion of the gay agenda? Is Litchfield Prison a preparation for life outside—or just a scale model of life outside? What could the governors of Litchfield learn from Jeremy Bentham and his panopticon? How is it that even in prison we find ourselves condemned to be free? Why is one of the worst things about prison being forced to see who and what we really are? It so happens that life in prison is absolutely full and overfull of philosophical implications. Orange Is the New Black and Philosophy stays close to the characters and scenes of the TV show, applying insights from ethics, existentialism, metaphysics, epistemology, and political philosophy. The book is aimed at thoughtful fans of this amazingly fine TV show, who want to learn more about its disturbing issues.
Download or read book Mr Robot and Philosophy written by Richard Greene and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. Robot has been hailed, not only as one of the most haunting and unnerving dramas ever to appear on television, but also as the first accurate popular presentation of how computer hacking and cyberterrorism actually work. Mr. Robot and Philosophy is aimed at thoughtful fans of this addictive show who will welcome the opportunity to explore Elliot Alderson's world from a philosophical perspective. The developing story of Mr. Robot constantly raises ethical and metaphysical issues. What happens to our personal identity when it’s extended into cyberspace and an array of electronic devices? Are we in control of our online lives or are we being controlled? What does our right to privacy mean in a world where millions of people can observe what we’re doing and saying? Is a virtual currency true money and could it replace traditional money? Can there be healthy forms of drug addiction? Can some types of so-called mental illness be useful and beneficial? Does it make any sense to unleash destruction upon the existing corporate economic structures, and can we expect something better to emerge from the ruins of a digital meltdown?
Download or read book I Am Because We are written by Fred L. Hord and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Solidarity after Black Power -- The Eschatological Dilemma: The Problem of Studying the Black Male Only as the Deaths That Result from Anti-Black Racism -- Selected Bibliography -- Back Cover
Download or read book Convergences written by Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy in dialogue.
Download or read book Out of Orange written by Cleary Wolters and published by HarperOne. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real-life Alex Vause from the critically acclaimed, top-rated Netflix show Orange Is the New Black tells her story in her own words for the first time—a powerful, surprising memoir about crime and punishment, friendship and marriage, and a life caught in the ruinous drug trade and beyond. Fans nationwide have fallen in love with Orange Is the New Black, the critically acclaimed and wildly popular Netflix show based on Piper Kerman’s sensational #1 New York Times bestseller. Now, Catherine Cleary Wolters—the inspiration for Alex Vause, Piper’s ex-girlfriend, friend, and sometimes-romantic partner on the show—tells her true story, offering details and insights that fill in the blanks, set the record straight, and answer common fan questions. An insightful, frustrating, heartbreaking, and uplifting analysis of crime and punishment in our times, Out of Orange is an intimate look at international drug crime—a seemingly glamorous lifestyle that dazzles unsuspecting young women and eventually leads them to the seedy world of prison. Told by a woman originally thrust into the spotlight without her permission—Wolters learned about Piper’s memoir in the media—Out of Orange chronicles Wolter’s time in the drug trade, her incarceration, her friendships and acquaintances with odd cellmates, her two marriages, and her complicated relationship with Piper. But Wolters is not solely defined by her past; she also reflects on her life and the person she is today. Filled with colorful characters, fascinating tales, painful sobering lessons, and hard-earned wisdom, Out of Orange is sure to be provocative, entertaining, and ultimately inspiring.
Download or read book Girls and Philosophy written by Richard Greene and published by Open Court. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The drama-comedy show Girls—often under-rated by being perceived as Sex and the City for the Millennial generation—has made TV history and provoked controversy for its pitilessly accurate portrayal of four oddly sympathetic twenty-something female characters, notable for their self-absorption, empathy deficits, and ineptitude with relationships. Among other breakthroughs, it is the first show to depict the sex act among the alienated young as nearly always awkward and unfulfilling. In Girls and Philosophy, a team of diverse yet always sensitive, empathic, and ept philosophers approach the world of Girls from a variety of angles and philosophical points of view. Underlying this New York world is the new reality of ambitious yet unfocused young people from comparatively advantaged backgrounds having their expectations chilled by the severe and prolonged economic recession. The writers attack many fascinating issues arising from Girls, including the meaning of authenticity in the twenty-first century, coming of age in a society with no clear guidelines for most of what matters in life,Girls as the only TV show the pop-culture-hating professor Theodor Adorno might have admired, feminist appraisals of these not-very-feminist characters and their frustrations, what the wardrobes of the four mean philosophically, how each of the four deals with the anxiety that comes from inescapable freedom, whether we need to amend the traditional list of seven deadly sins in the context of present-day New York, how the speech of the Millennials illustrates Austin’s theory of speech acts, how the learning of Hannah, Shoshanna, Jessa, and Marnie compares with the ancient Greek theory of the education of the young, and of course, why we once again find it natural to think of women in their early- to mid-twenties as ‘girls’.
Download or read book How to Watch Television Second Edition written by Ethan Thompson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition that brings the ways we watch and think about television up to the present We all have opinions about the television shows we watch, but television criticism is about much more than simply evaluating the merits of a particular show and deeming it “good” or “bad.” Rather, criticism uses the close examination of a television program to explore that program’s cultural significance, creative strategies, and its place in a broader social context. How to Watch Television, Second Edition brings together forty original essays—more than half of which are new to this edition—from today’s leading scholars on television culture, who write about the programs they care (and think) the most about. Each essay focuses on a single television show, demonstrating one way to read the program and, through it, our media culture. From fashioning blackness in Empire to representation in Orange is the New Black and from the role of the reboot in Gilmore Girls to the function of changing political atmospheres in Roseanne, these essays model how to practice media criticism in accessible language, providing critical insights through analysis—suggesting a way of looking at TV that students and interested viewers might emulate. The contributors discuss a wide range of television programs past and present, covering many formats and genres, spanning fiction and non-fiction, broadcast, streaming, and cable. Addressing shows from TV’s earliest days to contemporary online transformations of the medium, How to Watch Television, Second Edition is designed to engender classroom discussion among television critics of all backgrounds. To access additional essays from the first edition, visit the "links" tab at nyupress.org/9781479898817/how-to-watch-television-second-edition/.
Download or read book The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy written by Donna V. Jones and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the élan vital, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making.
Download or read book Stranger Things and Philosophy written by Jeffrey A. Ewing and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stranger Things and Philosophy is an important book, the first of its kind to examine the fantastical world of this award-winning, widely beloved, phenomenal show with a philosophical lens. This is important precisely because the show rests so heavily on a complex and thought-provoking mythos based around secretive government experiments and a parallel dimension that darkly reflects readers' own. The series as a whole has asked more questions than it has delivered answers, and the chapters in this volume will explore these topics. From the deepest recesses of the Upside Down, its tunnels snaking beneath the local bookstores of Hawkins, Indiana and who knows where else, this collection of philosophical musings on the world of Stranger Things promises to enlighten readers. This volume considers many of the philosophically related ideas that that come up in the show such as: What are the moral implications of secret government projects? What is the nature of friendship? Does scientific research need to be concerned with ethics? What might it be like to experience the world from the perspective of the Mind Flayer? Is it possible to understand the metaphysics of the Upside Down?
Download or read book Demystifying the Big House written by Katherine A Foss and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foss looks at popular depictions of prison such as Orange Is the New Black and Oz, television and film's function and influence in shaping discourse on prison life, and wide-ranging personal experiences of incarceration, ultimately challenging the media's inaccuracies and misrepresentations about the prison experience.
Download or read book On Black Media Philosophy written by Armond R. Towns and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown’s killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human.
Download or read book Feminist Perspectives on Orange Is the New Black written by April Kalogeropoulos Householder and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its 2013 premiere, Orange Is the New Black has become Netflix's most watched series, garnering critical praise and numerous awards and advancing the cultural phenomenon of binge-watching. Academic conferences now routinely feature panels discussing the show, and the book on which it is based is popular course material at many universities. Yet little work has been published on OINTB. The series has sparked debate: does it celebrate diversity or is it told from the perspective of white privilege, with characters embodying some of the most racist and sexist stereotypes in television history? This collection of new essays is the first to analyze the show's multiple layers of meaning. Examining Orange Is the New Black from a number of feminist perspectives, the contributors cover topics such as gender, race, class, sexuality, transgenderism, mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex, disability, and sexual assault.
Download or read book The Handmaid s Tale and Philosophy written by Rachel Robison-Greene and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Handmaid’s Tale and Philosophy, philosophers give their insights into the blockbuster best-selling novel and record-breaking TV series, The Handmaid’s Tale. The story involves a future breakaway state in New England, beset by environmental disaster and a plummeting birth rate, in which the few remaining fertile women are conscripted to have sex and bear children to the most powerful men, all justified and rationalized by religious fundamentalism. Among the questions raised by this riveting and harrowing story: ● The Handmaid’s Tale displays the connection between sex and power. What light does this story shed on sex and power in our own society? ● The divinity of the feminine is associated with the female capacity to give birth. Is this association inherently exploitative? ● In the story, the revolution rapidly rebranded people by changing their names and placing them into functional groups with specific titles. How important is change in language to the suppression of individual freedom? ● The Handmaid’s Tale sees everything through the eyes of one character. How is it possible to construct a self and an identity at odds with the definition which the culture attempts to impose? ● In oppressive societies, even the most oppressed do show some freedom of choice. What is the limit of autonomy in a repressive society ruled by a fanatical ideology? ● Our present ethics of sex relies heavily on the notion of consent, but in the world of The Handmaid’s Tale there is little scope for consent. How is the power of consent constricted by the broader social conditions? ● The feminist idea of Care Ethics can be used to critique various gender relationships. How does Care Ethics evaluate our own society and the society depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale? ● The society portrayed in the story is marked by fierce religiosity, yet the Christian God presumably disapproves of its brutal exploitation and oppression. What is the relation between a loving Deity and the literal interpretation of scriptural passages? ● Among many dystopian stories, what makes The Handmaid’s Tale particularly memorable, and what purpose is served by the contemplation of imaginary dystopias? ● Suicide is common in The Handmaid’s Tale, and contemplating the possibility of suicide is even more common. Can life be worth living if the political and religious structure is thoroughly malign? ● Beneath the theocratic preaching, there is the practical suggestion that everything is being arranged for the good of society and therefore of everyone. Who gets to decide and enforce what is in society’s best interests?
Download or read book Uneasy Street written by Rachel Sherman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A surprising and revealing look at how today’s elite view their wealth and place in society From TV’s “real housewives” to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers—from hedge fund financiers and artists to stay-at-home mothers—to examine their lifestyle choices and understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us.
Download or read book On Being Blue written by William H. Gass and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-03-18 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do. Gass writes: Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown and widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.
Download or read book The Marvelous Clouds written by John Durham Peters and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-06-19 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An ambitious re-writing—a re-synthesis, even—of concepts of media and culture . . . It is nothing less than an attempt at a history of Being.” —Los Angeles Review of Books When we speak of clouds these days, it is as likely that we mean data clouds or network clouds as cumulus or stratus. In their sharing of the term, both kinds of clouds reveal an essential truth: that the natural world and the technological world are not so distinct. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media. Peters defines media expansively as elements that compose the human world. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive. Through an encyclopedic array of examples from the oceans to the skies, The Marvelous Clouds reveals the long prehistory of so-called new media. Digital media, Peters argues, are an extension of early practices tied to the establishment of civilization such as mastering fire, building calendars, reading the stars, creating language, and establishing religions. New media do not take us into uncharted waters, but rather confront us with the deepest and oldest questions of society and ecology: how to manage the relations people have with themselves, others, and the natural world. A wide-ranging meditation on the many means we have employed to cope with the struggles of existence—from navigation to farming, meteorology to Google—The Marvelous Clouds shows how media lie at the very heart of our interactions with the world around us.
Download or read book How Fascism Works written by Jason Stanley and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen “One of the defining books of the decade.”—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • With a new preface • Fascist politics are running rampant in America today—and spreading around the world. A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history. As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership. By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals. “With unsettling insight and disturbing clarity, How Fascism Works is an essential guidebook to our current national dilemma of democracy vs. authoritarianism.”—William Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope
