Download or read book Rocket States Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination written by Fabienne Collignon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rocket States crosses the disciplines of Cold War Studies, American Literature, American Studies and Cultural Studies. The particular attraction of this study lies in the combination of its range-close textual and visual analysis of the correlations between land and weaponry, set firmly within its political and cultural contexts-with its unique analytical approach. The book offers a synthesis between history, theories of technology, theories of space, popular culture, literary study and military science. It illuminates a variety of literary texts from key writers and thinkers such as Pynchon, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, while also invoking figures like Nikola Tesla, James Webb, Batman and Ronald Reagan. Organised topographically, according to how missile technology manifests itself differently in particular locations, Rocket States's geographical targets are Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, variously titled 'Excavation', 'Preservation', 'Evacuation' and 'Transmission'. It advances through these states roughly chronologically, beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s and coming to an end in the first part of the 21st century. Collignon's argument is concerned with identifying the recurring figures and fantasies of the Cold War: the dome or parabola as sheltering techno-form; the fictions of total security adapting to constantly changing targeting strategies; gadget love; closed, freezing worlds. As such, Rocket States analyses by what processes the Cold War is frequently literalised in its weapons installations and how these facilities, in turn, shape dreams of containment, survival, escape and techno-supremacy.
Download or read book Rocket States Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination written by Fabienne Collignon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rocket States crosses the disciplines of Cold War Studies, American Literature, American Studies and Cultural Studies. The particular attraction of this study lies in the combination of its range?close textual and visual analysis of the correlations between land and weaponry, set firmly within its political and cultural contexts?with its unique analytical approach. The book offers a synthesis between history, theories of technology, theories of space, popular culture, literary study and military science. It illuminates a variety of literary texts from key writers and thinkers such as Pynchon, Stephen King, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe, while also invoking figures like Nikola Tesla, James Webb, Batman and Ronald Reagan. Organised topographically, according to how missile technology manifests itself differently in particular locations, Rocket States's geographical targets are Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, variously titled 'Excavation', 'Preservation', 'Evacuation' and 'Transmission'. It advances through these states roughly chronologically, beginning in the late 1940s and early 1950s and coming to an end in the first part of the 21st century. Collignon's argument is concerned with identifying the recurring figures and fantasies of the Cold War: the dome or parabola as sheltering techno-form; the fictions of total security adapting to constantly changing targeting strategies; gadget love; closed, freezing worlds. As such, Rocket States analyses by what processes the Cold War is frequently literalised in its weapons installations and how these facilities, in turn, shape dreams of containment, survival, escape and techno-supremacy.
Download or read book We Are All Astronauts written by Marc Blancher and published by Neofelis Verlag. This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We are all astronauts", the American architect and thinker Richard Buckminster Fuller wrote in 1968 in his book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, where he compared Earth to a spaceship, provided only with exhaustible resources while flying through space. These words show the presence the phenomenon of the astronaut and the cosmonaut had in the public mind from the second half of the twentieth century on: Buckminster Fuller was able to drive his point home by asking his audience to identify with one of the most prominent figures in the public sphere then: the space traveler. At the same time, Buckminster Fuller's words themselves seem to have played a significant role in further shaping the space-exploring human as a symbol and an image of humankind in general. The twelve contributions in this book by authors from the fields of literature, music, politics, history, the visual arts, film, computer games, comics, social sciences, and media theory track the development, changes and dynamics of this symbol by analyzing the various images of the astronaut and the cosmonaut as constructed throughout the different decades of space exploration, from its beginning to the present day.
Download or read book Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories in American History 2 volumes written by Christopher R. Fee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 869 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This up-to-date introduction to the complex world of conspiracies and conspiracy theories provides insight into why millions of people are so ready to believe the worst about our political, legal, religious, and financial institutions. Unsupported theories provide simple explanations for catastrophes that are otherwise difficult to understand, from the U.S. Civil War to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Ideas about shadowy networks that operate behind a cloak of secrecy, including real organizations like the CIA and the Mafia and imagined ones like the Illuminati, additionally provide a way for people to criticize prevailing political and economic arrangements, while for society's disadvantaged and forgotten groups, conspiracy theories make their suffering and alienation comprehensible and provide a focal point for their economic or political frustrations. These volumes detail the highly controversial and influential phenomena of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in American society. Through interpretive essays and factual accounts of various people, organizations, and ideas, the reader will gain a much greater appreciation for a set of beliefs about political scheming, covert intelligence gathering, and criminal rings that has held its grip on the minds of millions of American citizens and encouraged them to believe that the conspiracies may run deeper, and with a global reach.
Download or read book Cold War Legacies written by John Beck and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we are now living in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War. Drawing on theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Carl Schmitt, Bernard Stiegler and Paul Virilio this collection makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture.
Download or read book The World According to Philip K Dick written by A. Dunst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-04-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first essay collection dedicated to Philip K. Dick in two decades, this volume breaks new ground in science fiction scholarship and brings innovative critical perspectives to the study of one of the twentieth century's most influential authors.
Download or read book Experimental written by Natalia Cecire and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-30 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental.
Download or read book Against Value in the Arts and Education written by Sam Ladkin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art’s defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people’s lives lived in an “audit culture”, a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people’s work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the “value” they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.
Download or read book The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non Human written by Fabienne Collignon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human defines, conceptualizes, and evaluates the insectile—pertaining to an entomological fascination—in relation to subject formation. The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out entomologically. The book’s engagement with the insectile—its enactments, cultural dreamwork, fantasy transformations—‘in-forming’ the so-called human subject undertakes a broader deconstruction of said subject and demonstrates the foundational but occluded role of the insectile in subject formation. It tracks the insectile across the archives of psychoanalysis, seventeenth century still life painting, novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, and post-1970s film. The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human will be of interest for scholars, graduate students, and upper-level undergraduates in film studies, visual culture, popular culture, cultural and literary studies, comparative literature, and critical theory, offering the insectile as new category for theoretical thought.
Download or read book The Globalization of Space written by John Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in the analysis of space in a variety of disciplines, most notably in geography and politics. This collection of essays is the first to focus on what Foucault termed ‘heterotopias’, spaces that exhibit multiple layers of meaning and reveal tensions within society.
Download or read book Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War written by Steven Belletto and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this edited volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between U.S. and Soviet forces. Shining a spotlight on writers from the war’s numerous fronts and applying lenses of race, gender, and decolonization, the essayists present several new angles from which to view the tense global showdown that lasted roughly a half-century. Ultimately, they reframe the Cold War not merely as a divide between the Soviet Union and the United States, but between nations rich and poor, and mostly white and mostly not. By emphasizing the global dimensions of the Cold War, this innovative collection reveals emergent forms of post-WWII empire that continue to shape our world today, thereby raising the question of whether the Cold War has ever fully ended.
Download or read book Infrastructures of Apocalypse written by Jessica Hurley and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.
Download or read book Project Orion written by George Dyson and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-04 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Project Orion describes one of the most awesome 'might have beens' (and may yet bes!) of the space age. This is essential reading for anyone interested in government bureaucracies and the military industrial complex." -Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Download or read book Dark Sun written by Richard Rhodes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 770 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War. Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would dominate world politics for more than forty years.
Download or read book The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States written by Jeffrey Lewis and published by W H Allen. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 2020 Commission report on the North Korean nuclear attacks against the United States posits that there was a nuclear attack against the U.S. on March 21, 2020 by North Korea, and that a national bipartisan commission was created to investigate what and how it happened
Download or read book Taming Liquid Hydrogen written by Virginia Parker Dawson and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nuclear Folly A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis written by Serhii Plokhy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.
