Download or read book The Retro Futurism of Cuteness written by Jen Boyle and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2017-11-03 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it possible to conceive of a Hello Kitty Middle Ages or a Tickle Me Elmo Renaissance? The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first reference to "cute" in the sense of "attractive, pretty, charming" to 1834. More recently, Sianne Ngai has offered a critical overview of the cuteness of the twentieth-century avant-garde within the context of consumer culture. But if cuteness can get under the skin, what kinds of surfaces does it best infiltrate, particularly in the framework of historical forms, events, and objects that traditionally have been read as emergences around "big" aesthetics of formal symmetries, high affects, and resemblances? The Retrofuturism of Cuteness seeks to undo the temporal strictures surrounding aesthetic and affective categories, to displace a strict focus on commodification and cuteness, and to interrogate how cuteness as a minor aesthetics can refocus our perceptions and readings of both premodern and modern media, literature, and culture. Taking seriously the retro and the futuristic temporalities of cuteness, this volume puts in conversation projects that have unearthed remnants of a "cult of cute"-positioned historically and critically in between transitions into secularization, capitalist frameworks of commodification, and the enchantment of objects-and those that have investigated the uncanny haunting of earlier aesthetics in future-oriented modes of cuteness. The Latin acutus, the etymological root of cute, embraces the sharpened, the pointed, the nimble, the discriminating, and the piercing. But as Michael O'Rourke notes, cuteness evokes a proximity that is at once potentially invasive and contaminating and yet softening and transfiguring. Deploying cuteness as a mode of inquiry across time, this volume opens up unexpected lines of inquiry and unusual critical and creative aporias, from Christian asceticism, medieval cycle drama, and Shakespeare to manga, Bollywood, and Second Life. The projects collected here point to a spectrum of aesthetic-affective assemblages related to racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and class dimensions that exceed or trouble our contemporary perceptions of such registers within object-subject and subject-object entanglements. TABLE OF CONTENTS // Wan-Chuan Kao and Jen Boyle, "Introduction: The Time of the Child"Andrea Denny-Brown, "Torturer-Cute"Elizabeth Howie, "Indulgence and Refusal: Cuteness, Asceticism, and the Aestheticization of Desire"Claire Maria Chambers, "From Awe to Awww: Cuteness and the Idea of the Holy in Christian Commodity Culture"Justin Mullis, "All The Pretty Little Ponies: Bronies, Desire, and Cuteness"Marlis Schweitzer, "Consuming Celebrity: Commodities and Cuteness in the Circulation of Master William Henry West Betty"Mariah Junglan Min, "Embracing the Gremlin: Judas Iscariot and the (Anti-)Cuteness of Despair"Alicia Corts, "Cute, Charming, Dangerous: Child Avatars in Second Life"James M. Cochran, "What's Cute Got to Do with It?: Early Modern Proto-Cuteness in King Lear"Kara Watts, "Hamlet, Hesperides, and the Discursivity of Cuteness"Tripthi Pillai, "Cute Lacerations in Doctor Faustus and Omkara"Kelly Lloyd, "Katie Sokoler, Your Construction Paper Tears Can't Hide Your Yayoi Kusama-Neurotic Underbelly"
Download or read book Cute Accelerationism written by Amy Ireland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-10-08 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness. Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it—only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself. Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us. Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture. Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs…glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do. Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil’ textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.
Download or read book Cuteness Engineering written by Aaron Marcus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This state of the art monograph presents a unique introduction to thinking about cuteness and its incorporation into modern, especially computer-based, products and services. Cuteness is defined and explored in relation to user-centered design concepts and methods, in addition to considering the history of cuteness and cuteness in other cultures, especially in relation to eastern Asia. The authors provide detailed analyses and histories of cuteness in Japan and in China, the rise of Kawaii and Moe cultural artifacts, and their relation to social, psychological, and design issues. They also attempt an initial taxonomy of cuteness. Finally, detailed interviews with leading designers of cute products and services, such as Hello Kitty, provide an understanding of the philosophy and decision-making process of designers of cuteness. Cuteness Engineering: Designing Adorable Products and Services will be of interest and use to a wide range of professionals, researchers, academics, and students who are interested in exploring the world of cuteness in fresh new ways and gaining insights useful for their work and studies.
Download or read book The Power and Fluidity of Girlhood in Henry Darger s Art written by Leisa Rundquist and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first to examine Henry Darger’s conceptual and visual representation of “girls” and girlhood. Specifically, Leisa Rundquist charts the artist’s use of little girl imagery—his direct appropriations from mainstream sources as well as girls modified to meet his needs—in contexts that many scholars have read as puerile and psychologically disturbed. Consequently, this inquiry qualifies the intersexed aspects of Darger’s protagonists as well as addresses their inherent cute and little associations that signal multivocal meanings often in conflict with each other. Rundquist engages Darger’s art through thematic analyses of the artist’s writings, mature works, collages, and ephemeral materials. This book will be of particular interest to scholars in art history, art and gender studies, sociology, and contemporary art.
Download or read book The Cute written by Sianne Ngai and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection that tracks the astonishing impact of one vernacular aesthetic category—the cute—on postwar and contemporary art. The Cute tracks the astonishing impact of a single aesthetic category on post-war and contemporary art, and on the vast range of cultural practices and discourses on which artists draw. From robots and cat videos to ice cream socials, The Cute explores the ramifications of an aesthetic “of” or “about” minorness—or what is perceived to be diminutive, subordinate, and above all, unthreatening—on the shifting forms and contents of art today. This anthology is the first of its kind to show how contemporary artists have worked on and transformed the cute, in ways that not only complexify its meaning, but also reshape their own artistic practices. Artists surveyed include Peggy Ahwesh, Cosima Von Bonin, Nayland Blake, Paul Chan, Adrian Howells, Juliana Huxtable, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dean Kenning, Wyndham Lewis, Jeff Koons, Sean-Kierre Lyons, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Alake Shilling, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Takashi Murakami, Charlemagne Palestine, David Robbins, Mika Rottenberg, Allen Ruppersberg, Jack Smith, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Yoshitomo Nara Writers include Sasha Archibald, Roland Barthes, Leigh Claire La Berge, Lauren Berlant, Ian Bogost, Jennifer Doyle, Lee Edelman, Adrienne Edwards, Lewis Gordon, Rosemarie Garland-Thompson, Stephen Jay Gould, Lori Merish, John Morreall, Juliane Rebentisch, Frances Richard, Carrie Rickey, Friedrich Schiller, Peter Schjeldahl, Kanako Shiokawa, Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, Kevin Young
Download or read book Queer Euripides written by Sarah Olsen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first attempt to reconsider the entire corpus of an ancient canonical author through the lens of queerness broadly conceived, taking as its subject Euripides, the latest of the three great Athenian tragedians. Although Euripides' plays have long been seen as a valuable source for understanding the construction of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece, scholars of Greek tragedy have only recently begun to engage with queer theory and its ongoing developments. Queer Euripides represents a vital step in exploring the productive perspectives on classical literature afforded by the critical study of orientations, identities, affects and experiences that unsettle not only prescriptive understandings of gender and sexuality, but also normative social structures and relations more broadly. Bringing together twenty-one chapters by experts in classical studies, English literature, performance and critical theory, this carefully curated collection of incisive and provocative readings of each surviving play draws upon queer models of temporality, subjectivity, feeling, relationality and poetic form to consider "queerness" both as and beyond sexuality. Rather than adhering to a single school of thought, these close readings showcase the multiple ways in which queer theory opens up new vantage points on the politics, aesthetics and performative force of Euripidean drama. They further demonstrate how the analytical frameworks developed by queer theorists in the last thirty years deeply resonate with the ways in which Euripides' plays twist poetic form in order to challenge well-established modes of the social. By establishing how Greek tragedy can itself be a resource for theorizing queerness, the book sets the stage for a new model of engaging with ancient literature, which challenges current interpretive methods, explores experimental paradigms, and reconceptualizes the practice of reading to place it firmly at the center of the interpretive act.
Download or read book MIRIAM CAHN written by Marta Dziewanska and published by Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. This book was released on 2021-04-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rebel and feminist, the Switzerland-born Miriam Cahn is one of the major artists of her generation. Widely known for her drawings and paintings, she also experiments with photography, moving images, sculptures, and performance art. Cahn’s diverse body of work is disturbing and dreamlike, filled with striking human figures pulsing with an energy both passionate and violent. These pieces, along with Cahn’s reflections on artistic expression, have always responded to her contemporary moment. In the 1980s, her work addressed the feminist, peace, and environmental movements, while the work she produced in the 1990s and early 2000s contains allusions to the war in the former Yugoslavia, the conflict in the Middle East, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Her recent production tackles ever-evolving political conflicts, engaging with the European refugee crisis and the “#metoo” movement. Miriam Cahn: I as Human examines different facets of the artist’s prolific and troubling oeuvre, featuring contributions from art historians, critics, and philosophers including Kathleen Bühler, Paul B. Preciado, Elisabeth Lebovici, Adam Szymczyk, Natalia Sielewicz and .
Download or read book Irresistible written by Joshua Paul Dale and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2023-10-26 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are some things cute, and others not? What happens to our brains when we see something cute? And how did cuteness go global, from Hello Kitty to Disney characters? Cuteness is an area where culture and biology get tangled up. Seeing a cute animal triggers some of the most powerful psychological instincts we have - the ones that elicit our care and protection - but there is a deeper story behind the broad appeal of Japanese cats and saccharine greetings cards. Joshua Paul Dale, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of cuteness studies, explains how the cute aesthetic spread around the globe, from pop brands to Lolita fashion, kids' cartoons and the unstoppable rise of Hello Kitty. Irresistible delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan's kawaii culture, and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world. If adorable things really do rewire our brains, it can help answer some of the biggest questions we have about our evolutionary history and the mysterious origins of animal domestication. This is the fascinating cultural history of cuteness, and a revealing look at how our most powerful psychological impulses have remade global style and culture.
Download or read book Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles written by Marlis Schweitzer and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bloody Tyrants and Little Pickles traces the theatrical repertoire of a small group of white Anglo-American actresses as they reshaped the meanings of girlhood in Britain, North America, and the British West Indies during the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a study of the possibilities and the problems girl performers presented as they adopted the manners and clothing of boys, entered spaces intended for adults, and assumed characters written for men. It asks why masculine roles like Young Norval, Richard III, Little Pickle, and Shylock came to seem “normal” and “natural” for young white girls to play, and it considers how playwrights, managers, critics, and audiences sought to contain or fix the at-times dangerous plasticity they exhibited both on and off the stage. Schweitzer analyzes the formation of a distinct repertoire for girls in the first half of the nineteenth century, which delighted in precocity and playfulness and offered up a model of girlhood that was similarly joyful and fluid. This evolving repertoire reflected shifting perspectives on girls’ place within Anglo-American society, including where and how they should behave, and which girls had the right to appear at all.
Download or read book Memorialising Premodern Monarchs written by Gabrielle Storey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the legacies and depictions of monarchs in an international context, focusing on both self-representation and commemoration by others. Spanning ancient India through to eighteenth-century Russia, this volume offers several case studies to demonstrate trends and patterns in how different societies chose to commemorate and remember their rulers in a variety of mediums. Contributions highlight several lesser known rulers, alongside more famous ones such as Henry VIII of England, to develop a deeper understanding of how memory and monarchy functioned when drawn together. Memorialising Premodern Monarchs brings to the fore the importance of memory and memorialisation when considering the legacies and records of past rulers and their societies, and allows a deeper reflection on how these rulers live on through the historical record and popular culture.
Download or read book Critical Confessions Now written by Abdulhamit Arvas and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is based on the postmedieval journal special issue Critical Confessions Now. These chapters on confessions exhibit great diversity and take up different disciplinary approaches by scholars who stand at various stages of their careers. They address not only different time periods but also various linguistic and cultural contexts. Contributors deploy a wide array of methods, critical approaches, and narrative voices, and contributors assumed the confessional voice with a whole host of affective responses — from enthusiasm to cautious hesitation to outright discomfort. Previously published in postmedieval Volume 11, issue 2-3, August 2020.
Download or read book Teaching Coding in K 12 Schools written by Therese Keane and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-27 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains highly effective ways to teach coding and computational thinking skills throughout primary and secondary schooling. It outlines a research informed path for students from birth to 18 years, identifying key skills and learning activities. Based on global perspectives and research at each stage, it outlines how these findings can be applied in the classroom. Teaching coding to students in K-12 has been a skillset that has been debated across educational jurisdictions globally for some time. The book provides examples of schools that are teaching coding to students in engaging and relevant ways, delivering well thought out compulsory curriculums. Additionally, it provides examples of schools where coding is not mandated in the curriculum and is taught in an ad-hoc manner. Through the full discussion of all of these varied examples, the book presents both sides of the serious and ongoing debate in the field as to whether coding should be taught in an explicit way at all. The increasing school of thought that teaching coding is a skill that is already obsolete, and the focus should be on computational thinking is completely examined and presented. In this book, both sides of the argument, as well as the specific, meticulous research underlying each side, are given equal weight. The debate is a serious one and requires a clearly defined thematic response with evidence on all sides of the argument presented rationally. This book does just that. Created by carefully selected authors from around the world, it will be a highly studied research reference.
Download or read book The Myth Awakens written by Ken Derry and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2018-09-13 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens made a strong impression on fans. Many were excited by what they saw as a return to the spirit of George Lucas's 1977 creation. Others--including several white supremacy groups--were upset and offended by key differences, most notably the shift away from a blond, blue-eyed, male protagonist. When the film was finally released, reactions similarly seemed to hinge on whether or not The Force Awakens renewed the "mythic" aspects of the original trilogy in ways that fans approved of. The Myth Awakens examines the religious implications of this phenomenon, considering the ways in which myth can function to reinforce "traditional" social and political values. In their analyses the authors of this book reflect on fan responses in relation to various elements of (and changes to) the Star Wars canon--including toys, video games, and novels, as well as several of the films. They do so using a variety of critical tools, drawing from studies of gender, race, psychology, politics, authority, music, ritual, and memory.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature written by Raluca Radulescu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern interpretations such as race, gender studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism. Draws on the combined extensive experience of teaching and research in medieval English and comparative literature within and outside of anglophone higher education and looks to the future of this fast-paced area of literary culture. Contains an indispensable section on theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts. This Companion provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to medieval literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on English literature.
Download or read book The Paranormal and Popular Culture written by Darryl Caterine and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-18 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interest in preternatural and supernatural themes has revitalized the Gothic tale, renewed explorations of psychic powers and given rise to a host of social and religious movements based upon claims of the fantastical. And yet, in spite of this widespread enthusiasm, the academic world has been slow to study this development. This volume rectifies this gap in current scholarship by serving as an interdisciplinary overview of the relationship of the paranormal to the artefacts of mass media (e.g. novels, comic books, and films) as well as the cultural practices they inspire. After an introduction analyzing the paranormal’s relationship to religion and entertainment, the book presents essays exploring its spiritual significance in a postmodern society; its (post)modern representation in literature and film; and its embodiment in a number of contemporary cultural practices. Contributors from a number of discplines and cultural contexts address issues such as the shamanistic aspects of Batman and lesbianism in vampire mythology. Covering many aspects of the paranormal and its effect on popular culture, this book is an important statement in the field. As such, it will be of utmost interest to scholars of religious studies as well as media, communication, and cultural studies.
Download or read book Affective Materialities written by Kara Watts and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Affective Materialities reexamines modernist theorizations of the body and opens up the artistic, political, and ethical possibilities at the intersection of affect theory and ecocriticism, two recent directions in literary studies not typically brought into conversation. Modernist creativity, the volume proposes, may return to us notions of the feeling, material body that contemporary scholarship has lost touch with, bodies that suggest alternative relations to others and to the world. Contributors argue that modernist writers frequently bridge the dichotomy between body and world by portraying bodies that merge with or are re-created by their surroundings into an amalgam of self and place. Chapters focus on this treatment of the body through works by canonical modernists including William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster alongside lesser-studied writers Janet Frame, Herbert Read, and Nella Larsen. Showing the ways the body in literature can be a lens for understanding the fluidities of race, gender, and sexuality, as well as species and subjectivity, this volume maps the connections among modernist aesthetics, histories of the twentieth-century body, and the concerns of modernism that can also speak to urgent concerns of today.
Download or read book Power Down Little Robot written by Anna Staniszewski and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2015-04-21 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's time to power down for the night, but Little Robot isn't ready! He quickly opens his stalling program. Luckily, Mom Unit knows exactly how to get him into his sleep module.From a debut picture book author and the illustrator of Little Boo, this funny twist on a familiar nighttime routine will click with bedtime avoidance experts everywhere.
