Download or read book The Extreme in Contemporary Culture written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-02-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in ‘extreme cultures’. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body’s immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions. The Extreme in Contemporary Culture studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.
Download or read book Extreme Metal written by Keith Kahn-Harris and published by Berg. This book was released on 2007-01-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes interviews with band members and fans, from countries ranging from the UK and US to Israel and Sweden, this book demonstrates the power and subtlety of an often surprising and misunderstood musical form. It draws on first-hand research to explore the global extreme metal scene.
Download or read book The Extreme Gone Mainstream written by Cynthia Miller-Idriss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-03 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book comes at a time that could hardly be more important. Miller-Idriss opens up a completely new approach to understanding the processes of violent radicalization through subcultural products...(and) will surely become a standard work in the study of right-wing extremism."--Daniel Koehler, founder and director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies.dies.
Download or read book Ecoprecarity written by Pramod K. Nayar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-13 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian vision that informs much environmental thought in popular cultures, the states of ontological integrity and genetic belonging in the age of cloning, xenotransplantation and biotechnology's 'capitalisation' of life itself, and the construction of the 'wild' in these texts. It pays attention to the ecological uncanny and the monstrous that haunts ecodystopias and forms of natureculture that emerge in the bioeconomies since the late twentieth century.
Download or read book Extreme Domesticity written by Susan Fraiman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.
Download or read book Transformations written by Grant David McCracken and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-05-12 with total page 930 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The reinvention of identity in today's world.
Download or read book The Crisis of Presence in Contemporary Culture written by Vincent Miller and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Discussions about the contemporary online world are often in a one-dimensional manner shaped by moral panics about online trolling, cyberbullying, cybercrime, terrorists online, etc. The associated right-wing extremist agenda for Internet politics is about control, surveillance and censorship. Vince Miller’s book questions this agenda and is an excellent work for understanding how to use philosophical thought for the analysis of ethics, privacy and disclosure in this turbulent world of the Internet in the information society. It shows how to come to grips with the contested relationship between online freedom and control." - Christian Fuchs, University of Westminster, Author of Social Media: A Critical Introduction By investigating three issues which have captured the public imagination as ′problems′ emerging directly from the contemporary use of communications technology (anti-social behaviour, privacy and free speech online), Vincent Miller explores how the digital revolution is challenging our notion of ′self′ and ′presence′. Through a critical and philosophical examination of each of these cases, he argues that they have at their root the same phenomena: ‘a crisis of presence’. Focussing on the concept of presence, and the challenges that our changing presence poses to our ethics, privacy and public discourse, Miller illustrates how ubiquitous communication technologies have created a disjuncture between how we think we exist in the world and how we actually do exist through our use of such devices. The solution, he claims, is not to focus exclusively on ‘content’ and its regulation as much as it is to examine, understand and resist the alienating aspects of the media itself, such as the technological ordering, metaphysical abstraction and mediation which increasingly define our social encounters and presences. He suggests that such resistance involves several ambitious revisions in our ethical, legal and technological regimes.
Download or read book New Cultural Studies written by Clare Birchall and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores new directions and territories for cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School. It is a generation whose whole education has been shaped by theory, and who frequently turn to it as a means to think through some of the issues and current problems in contemporary culture and cultural studies. In a period when departments which were once hotbeds of "high theory" are returning to more sociological and social science oriented modes of research, and 9/11 and the war in Iraq especially have helped create a sense of "post-theoretical" political urgency which leaves little time for the "elitist," "Eurocentric," "textual" concerns of "Theory," theoretical approaches to the study of culture have, for many of this generation, never seemed so important or so vital. New Cultural Studies explores theory's past, present, and most especially future role in cultural studies. It does so by providing an authoritative and accessible guide, for students and teachers alike, to: the most innovative members of this "new generation" the thinkers and theories currently influencing new work in cultural studies: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, Kittler, Laclau, Levinas, and iek the new territories currently being mapped out across the intersections of cultural studies and cultural theory: anti-capitalism, ethics, the posthumanities, post-Marxism, and the transnational
Download or read book Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture written by Barbara Korte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heroes and heroic discourse have gained new visibility in the twenty-first century. This is noted in recent research on the heroic, but it has been largely ignored that heroism is increasingly a global phenomenon both in terms of production and consumption. This edited collection aims to bridge this research void and brings together case studies by scholars from different parts of the world and diverse fields. They explore how transnational and transcultural processes of translation and adaptation shape notions of the heroic in non-Western and Western cultures alike. The book provides fresh perspectives on heroism studies and offers a new angle for global and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book Extreme Makeover written by Teresa Tomeo and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author presents research and her perspectives on how the teachings of the Catholic Church both liberate and dignify women.
Download or read book Narrative Dynamics written by Brian Richardson and published by Ohio State University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology brings together essential essays on major facets of narrative dynamics, that is, the means by which "narratives traverse their often unlikely routes from beginning to end." It includes the most widely cited and discussed essays on narrative beginnings, temporality, plot and emplotment, sequence and progression, closure, and frames. The text is designed as a basic reader for graduate courses in narrative and critical theory across disciplines including literature, drama and theatre, and film. Narrative Dynamics includes such classic exponents as E. M. Forster on story and plot; Vladimir Propp on the structure of the folktale; R. S. Crane on plot; Boris Tomashevsky on story, plot, and, motif; M. M. Bakhtin on the chronotope; and Gerard Genette on narrative time. Richardson highlights essential feminist essays by Nancy K. Miller on plot and plausibility, Rachel Blau Duplessis on closure, and Susan Winnett on narrative and desire. These are complimented by newer pieces by Susan Stanford Friedman on spatialization and Robyn Warhol on serial fiction. Other major contributions include Edward Said on beginnings, Hayden White on historical narrative, Peter Brooks on plot, Paul Ricoeur on time, D. A. Miller on closure, James Phelan on progression, and Jacques Derrida on the frame. Recent essays from the perspective of cultural studies, postmodernism, and artificial intelligence bring this collection right up to the present.
Download or read book Pop Culture Places 3 volumes written by Gladys L. Knight and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-08-11 with total page 1128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three-volume reference set explores the history, relevance, and significance of pop culture locations in the United States—places that have captured the imagination of the American people and reflect the diversity of the nation. Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture serves as a resource for high school and college students as well as adult readers that contains more than 350 entries on a broad assortment of popular places in America. Covering places from Ellis Island to Fisherman's Wharf, the entries reflect the tremendous variety of sites, historical and modern, emphasizing the immense diversity and historical development of our nation. Readers will gain an appreciation of the historical, social, and cultural impact of each location and better understand how America has come to be a nation and evolved culturally through the lens of popular places. Approximately 200 sidebars serve to highlight interesting facts while images throughout the book depict the places described in the text. Each entry supplies a brief bibliography that directs students to print and electronic sources of additional information.
Download or read book Locating Imagination in Popular Culture written by Nicky van Es and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-29 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people’s favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.
Download or read book Gender and Popular Culture written by Katie Milestone and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-29 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the role of popular culture in the construction of gendered identities in contemporary society. It draws on a wide range of popular cultural forms - including popular music, newspapers and television - to illustrate how femininity and masculinity are produced, represented and consumed. The authors blend primary and secondary research to offer the reader a balanced yet novel overview of the area. Students are introduced to key theories and concepts in the fields of gender studies and popular culture, which are made accessible and interesting through their application to topical examples such as DJs, binge drinking and computer games. The book is structured into three clear, user-friendly sections: 1. Production, gender and popular culture: An investigation of who produces popular culture, why gendered patterns occur, and how they impact on content. 2. Representation, gender and popular culture: An examination of how men and women are represented in contemporary popular culture, and how notions of (in)appropriate femininity and masculinity are constructed. 3. Consumption, gender and popular culture: An exploration of who consumes what in popular culture, how gendered consumption relates to space, and what the effects of consuming representations of gender are. Gender and Popular Culture will be essential reading for students and scholars of media and cultural studies at all levels.
Download or read book Communicating Health Risks to the Public written by Dawn Hillier and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews current health risk communication strategies, and examines and assesses the technical and psycho-sociological tools available to support risk communication plans. It brings together approaches to risk communication from a number of countries and describes the techniques, including drama, storytelling and scenarios that are used to identify and prioritise key communication issues, and to identify policy responses. The book also provides a review of the methods and tools available for risk assessment, risk communication and priority setting, which are relevant not only to practitioners but to health planning more generally, and to many other areas of public health and policy. The discussion of these techniques is supported by case studies, and is concluded by a chapter reflecting on the conceptual and research issues that still need to be addressed. It also proposes new directions for risk communication that key into the public imagination with the aim of gaining their trust and confidence in the risk messages. Communicating Health Risks to the Public: A Global Perspective brings together a wide variety of perspectives on risk communication, from the perspectives of health, anthropology, psychology, and media. It should be of interest not only to those involved in risk assessment or communication but to anyone interested in the role of science and the media in the political process.
Download or read book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture written by Paul A. Cantor and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Analyzes how ideas about economics and political philosophy find their way into everything from Star Trek to Malcolm in the Middle.” —Wall Street Journal Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage their lives? In this groundbreaking work, Paul A. Cantor—whose previous book, Gilligan Unbound, was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times—explores the ways in which television shows such as Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and films such as The Aviator and Mars Attacks! have portrayed both top-down and bottom-up models of order. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal vision of America?particularly its emphasis on the virtues of spontaneous order?with the Marxist understanding of the “culture industry” and the Hobbesian model of absolute state control. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture concludes with a discussion of the impact of 9/11 on film and television, and the new anxieties emerging in contemporary alien-invasion narratives: the fear of a global technocracy that seeks to destroy the nuclear family, religious faith, local government, and other traditional bulwarks against the absolute state.
Download or read book Crime Deviance and Popular Culture written by Dimitris Akrivos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the links between crime, deviance and popular culture in our highly-mediatised era, offering an insight into the cultural processes through which particular practices acquire a criminal or deviant status, and come to be seen as social problems. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the edited collection brings together international scholars across various areas of specialisation to provide an up-to-date analysis of some important and topical issues in 21st-century popular culture. The chapters look at different aspects of popular culture, including fictional detective narratives and the true crime genre, popular media constructions of sexual deviance and Islamophobia, sports, graffiti and outlaw biker subcultures. The authors examine a wide range of relevant case studies through a number of crime and deviance-related theories. Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture will be of importance to scholars and students across several disciplines, including criminology, sociology of deviance, social anthropology, media studies, cultural studies, television studies and linguistics.