Download or read book Presidential Unrealities written by Sebastian M. Herrmann and published by Universitätsverlag Winter. This book was released on 2014-06-12 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes and historicizes an important and popular motif in contemporary US political discourse: the notion that politics has become increasingly ‘unreal.’ At the turn of the millennium, the simulated quality of politics in general and of the US presidency in particular has become a major object of concern across a broad range of venues and media: publications in media studies and political science, newspaper editorials, novels, films, and TV shows alike worry over how much or how little we can actually know about the reality of the US president when all our knowledge is based on carefully staged media representations. Rather than adding another voice to this concern, ‘Presidential Unrealities’ investigates the cultural work such discussions do. Charting their histories and their cultural resonances, the book argues that debating ‘presidential unreality’ provides a crucial vocabulary by way of which the US public negotiates the postmodernization of American culture and society.
Download or read book Poetics of Politics written by Sebastian M. Herrmann and published by Universitätsverlag Winter. This book was released on 2015-04-22 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural production in the United States. As recent scholarship has observed, American literature and culture around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transition.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this book points to the interplay between the textual and the political as a dynamic – always locally specific – that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotiating social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture.
Download or read book In the Land of the Unreal written by Lisa Messeri and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal, Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.
Download or read book Words of Crisis as Words of Power written by Marta Neüff and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume explores crisis rhetoric in contemporary U.S. American presidential speechmaking. Rhetorical leadership constitutes an inherent feature of the modern presidency. Particularly during times of critical events, the president is expected to react and address the nation. However, the power of the office also allows him or her to direct attention to particular topics and thus rhetorically create or exploit the notion of crisis. This monograph examines the verbal responses of George W. Bush and Barack Obama to pressing issues during their terms in office. Assuming an interdisciplinary approach, it illuminates the characteristics of modern crisis rhetoric. The aim of the book is to show that elements of Puritan rhetoric, and specifically the tradition of the jeremiad, although taken out of their original context and modified to suit a modern multiethnic society, can still be detected in contemporary political communication. It will be of interest to students and scholars of presidential rhetoric, political communication, sociolinguistics, and cultural studies.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies written by Nina Morgan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the "transnational" and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies.
Download or read book Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East written by Michael Butter and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2014-02-27 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conspiracy Theories in the United States and the Middle East is the first book to approach conspiracy theorizing from a decidedly comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Whereas previous studies have engaged with conspiracy theories within national frameworks only, this collection of essays draws attention to the fact that conspiracist visions are transnational narratives that travel between and connect different cultures. It focuses on the United States and the Middle East because these two regions of the world are entangled in manifold ways and conspiracy theories are currently extremely prominent in both. The contributors to the volume are scholars of Middle Eastern Studies, Anthropology, History, Political Science, Cultural Studies, and American Studies, who approach the subject from a variety of different theories and methodologies. However, all of them share the fundamental assumption that conspiracy theories must not be dismissed out of hand or ridiculed. Usually wrong and frequently dangerous, they are nevertheless articulations of and distorted responses to needs and anxieties that must be taken seriously. Focusing on individual case studies and displaying a high sensitivity for local conditions and the cultural environment, the essays offer a nuanced image of the workings of conspiracy theories in the United States and the Middle East.
Download or read book Beyond Narrative written by Sebastian M. Herrmann and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book calls for an investigation of the ›borderlands of narrativity‹ — the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the ›beyond‹ of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of »narrative liminality,« which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years.
Download or read book Communicating Unreality written by Gabriel Weimann and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reviews the images and meanings which play a vital role in our mass-mediated world. The author demonstrates that there is often a large gap between reality and the reconstruction of realities as communicated by the mass media.
Download or read book Virtual Unreality written by Charles Seife and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-06-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Proofiness and Zero explains how to separate fact from fantasy in the digital world Digital information is a powerful tool that spreads unbelievably rapidly, infects all corners of society, and is all but impossible to control—even when that information is actually a lie. In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife uses the skepticism, wit, and sharp facility for analysis that captivated readers in Proofiness and Zero to take us deep into the Internet information jungle and cut a path through the trickery, fakery, and cyber skullduggery that the online world enables. Taking on everything from breaking news coverage and online dating to program trading and that eccentric and unreliable source that is Wikipedia, Seife arms his readers with actual tools—or weapons—for discerning truth from fiction online.
Download or read book The Unreality Industry written by Ian I. Mitroff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fortells the trend that mass media outlets are helping to blur the line between reality and fantasy.
Download or read book Revisiting and Revising the Fifties in Contemporary US Popular Culture written by Eleonora Ravizza and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-25 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Eleonora Ravizza analyzes how contemporary American popular culture has represented and reproduced the fifties. By investigating the cultural work of films and TV series from the last two decades, the book uncovers the inherent limitations of a ‘revisionist’ take on the fifties. Ravizza argues that, due to the visual nature of the fifties—crystallized in American consciousness through the widespread influence of television—most contemporary attempts to rework and rewrite the regressive gender, queer, and racial politics fall short of such a revisionist reevaluation.
Download or read book The Spectator written by and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 1132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A weekly review of politics, literature, theology, and art.
Download or read book History Has Begun written by Bruno Maçães and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilizations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, American culture was overshadowed by Europe until recently. What if this isn't the end? In History Has Begun, Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America's future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, he takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path. We can see the birth pangs of this new civilization in today's debates on guns, religion, foreign policy and the significance of Trump. Should the coronavirus pandemic be regarded as an opportunity to build a new kind of society? What will its values be, and what will this new America look like? Maçães traces the long arc of US history to argue that in contrast to those who see the US on the cusp of decline, it may well be simply shifting to a new model, one equally powerful but no longer liberal. Consequently, it is no longer enough to analyze America's current trajectory through the simple prism of decline vs. progress, which assumes a static model-America as liberal leviathan. Rather, Maçães argues that America may be casting off the liberalism that has defined the country since its founding for a new model, one more appropriate to succeeding in a transformed world.
Download or read book Sex and the Unreal City written by Anthony Esolen and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unreal City: a cartoon megalopolis where towers are built of cotton candy, facts scatter like pixie dust, and the truth is whatever you feel it to be. And it's no fantasy. It's where we live. "We dwell in Unreal City. We believe in un-being." With saber-like wit, poet and professor Anthony Esolen leads readers on a tour through the ruins of their own Western world—through king-size bookstores, manicured college campuses, strobe-lit choir lofts, mechanized farms, divorce courts, drag-queen libraries, and beyond. This hilarious guide to a culture gone mad with sex and self-care minces no words and spares no egos. We the people of Unreal City are no better, and certainly no smarter, than our fathers. But fear not. Sex and the Unreal City insists there's no need to settle down in the ninth circle of unreality. Esolen lights a torch and heads up the well-trod path back to our cleaner, kinder, truer homeland: Earth. Along the way, the author sings the songs of masters long forgotten—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, the Evangelists—and asks us to join in.
Download or read book MYTH SYMBOL AND RITUAL ELUCIDATORY PATHS TO THE FANTASTIC UNREALITY written by MARIA-LUIZA DUMITRU OANCEA and published by Editura Universității din București - Bucharest University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume insists on the policies derived from the social ideas generated by myths, the updating of myths as an arsenal of social pedagogy, on the ethnic condition of the relevance of myths, but also on the resumption by mass media of the pejorative sense of the myth. This volume is part of the scientific series “Mythology and Folklore”.
Download or read book The Fortnightly written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 1160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Fortnightly Review written by and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 1268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
