Download or read book Virtual Desire written by Ann Lawrence and published by Love Spell. This book was released on 2000 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hero of a virtual reality game, Vad is every woman's fantasy, with his silver-blond hair, a magnificent face, and well-muscled thighs. When Gwen finds him snoring away in her video game shop, she thinks he must be out to win the Tolemac warrior look-alike contest. But the passion he ignites in her is far too real. By the author of "Virtual Heaven".
Download or read book Objects of Desire written by Clare Sestanovich and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A debut story collection of the rarest kind ... you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." —Entertainment Weekly Fresh, intimate stories of women’s lives from an extraordinary new literary voice, laying bare the unexpected beauty and irony in contemporary life A college freshman, traveling home, strikesup an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a family’s reckoning with its old taboos. A wife considers the secrets her marriage once contained. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into a gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives, from the brink of adulthood to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. Tender, lucid, and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last—a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.
Download or read book Becoming of the Body written by Amaleena Damle and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-09 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a long tradition of objectification, 20th-century French feminism often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing. Amaleena Damle addresses questions of bodies, boundaries and philosophical discourses by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary philosophers and authors on the subject of contemporary female corporeality and transformation.
Download or read book Love Stories written by Paul Manning and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the remote highlands of the country of Georgia, a small group of mountaindwellers called the Khevsurs used to express sexuality and romance in ways that appear to be highly paradoxical. On the one hand, their practices were romantic, but could never lead to marriage. On the other hand, they were sexual, but didn't correspond to what North Americans, or most Georgians, would have called sex. These practices were well documented by early ethnographers before they disappeared completely by the midtwentieth century, and have become a Georgian obsession. In this fascinating book, Manning recreates the story of how these private, secretive practices became a matter of national interest, concern, and fantasy. Looking at personal expressions of love and the circulation of these narratives at the broader public level of the modern nation, Love Stories offers an ethnography of language and desire that doubles as an introduction to key linguistic genres and to the interplay of language and culture.
Download or read book Reload written by Mary Flanagan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-05-03 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of feminist cyberfiction and theoretical and critical writings on gender and technoculture. Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyberworld. Reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists writing here view cyberculture as a social experiment with an as-yet-unfulfilled potential to create new identities, relationships, and cultures. The book brings together women's cyberfiction—fiction that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies—and feminist theoretical and critical investigations of gender and technoculture. From a variety of viewpoints, the writers consider the effects of rapid and profound technological change on culture, in particular both the revolutionary and reactionary effects of cyberculture on women's lives. They also explore the feminist implications of the cyborg, a human-machine hybrid. The writers challenge the conceptual and institutional rifts between high and low culture, which are embedded in the texts and artifacts of cyberculture.
Download or read book Human Thought written by J.R. Mendola and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 669 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conscious experience and thought content are customarily treated as distinct problems. This book argues that they are not. Part One develops a chastened empiricist theory of content, which cedes to experience a crucial role in rooting the contents of thoughts, but deploys an expanded conception of experience and of the ways in which contents may be rooted in experience. Part Two shows how, were the world as we experience it to be, our neurophysiology would be sufficient to constitute capacities for the range of intuitive thoughts recognized by Part One. Part Three argues that physics has shown that our experience is not veridical, and that this implies that no completely plausible account of how we have thoughts is comprehensible by humans. Yet this leaves thoughts not especially suspect, because such considerations also imply that all positive and contingent human conceptions of anything are false.
Download or read book Longing written by Jean Petrucelli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longing: Psychoanalytic Musings on Desire is a contemporary, interdisciplinary exploration of one of psychoanalysis's most foundational and fascinating areas of investigation. This anthology explores the vicissitudes and varieties of desire, its public and private, normative and transgressive, its light and dark expressions. It examines desire in its relational, cultural, clinical, physical, sexual and aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays demonstrate an understanding of the difficulties of identifying and realizing desire, precisely because it is multiple, omnipresent, shape-shifting, ongoing and, perhaps, always ultimately unfulfillable. They question whether desire is by definition something that cannot be satisfied, and contemplate how we relate to our desires? Interpersonal psychoanalytic practice and theory understands desire not merely as an intrapsychic drive but also as a force shaped by and shaping interpersonal relationships. From within this perspective, a number of the contributors examine a broad variety of clinical manifestations of desire as it struggles for expression or suppression.
Download or read book Data Made Flesh written by Robert Mitchell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-02-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an age of cloning, cyborgs, and biotechnology, the line between bodies and bytes seems to be disappearing. DataMade Flesh is the first collection to address the increasingly important links between information and embodiment, at a moment when we are routinely tempted, in the words of Donna Haraway, "to be raptured out of the bodies that matter in the lust for information," whether in the rush to complete the Human Genome Project or in the race to clone a human being.
Download or read book Oedipus written by Juan-David Nasio and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First English translation of Nasio's groundbreaking work on the Oedipus complex.
Download or read book Virtual Warrior written by Ann Lawrence and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video-game store owner Neil Scott transports himself into a virtual-reality game, where he must protect a beautiful aspiring queen. But in this harsh land vastly different from his own, Neil discovers a life worth struggling for, principles worth fighting for--and the love of a woman that can convince him love is worth dying for. (July)
Download or read book Methods of Desire written by Aurora Donzelli and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2019-08-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.
Download or read book Is Oedipus Online written by Jerry Aline Flieger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-05-06 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis as a navigation device for the cultural maze of the twenty-first century. "Can Freud be 'updated' in the twenty-first century, or is he a venerated but outmoded genius?" asks Jerry Aline Flieger. In Is Oedipus Online? Flieger stages an encounter between psychoanalysis and the new century, testing the viability of Freud's theories in light of the emergent realities of our time. Responding to prominent critics of psychoanalysis and approaching our current preoccupations from a Freudian angle, she presents a reading of Freudian theory that coincides with and even clarifies new concepts in science and culture. Fractals, emergence, topological modeling, and other nonlinearities, for example, can be understood in light of both Freud's idea of the symptom as a nodal point and Lacan's concept of networks (rather than sequential cause and effect) that link psychic realities. At the same time, Flieger suggests how emerging paradigms in science and culture may elucidate Freud's cultural theory. Like Slavoj Zizek, editor of the Short Circuits series, Flieger shifts effortlessly from field to field, discussing psychoanalysis, millennial culture, nonlinear science, and the landscape of cyberspace. In the first half of the book, "Re-siting Oedipus," she draws on the work of Lyotard, Zizek, Deleuze, Virilio, Baudrillard, Haraway and others, to refute the assumption of Freud's outdatedness in the new century. Then, in "Freud Sitings in Millennial Theory," she recasts oedipal theory, siting/sighting/citing Freud in a twenty-first-century context. Thinking of Oedipus—decipherer of enigmas, wanderer—as a navigator or search engine allows us to see psychoanalysis as a navigation device for the cultural maze of the "bimillennial" era, and Oedipus himself as a circuit of intersubjective processes by which we become human. For humanity—still needed in the "posthuman" century—is at the core of Freud's theory: "Reading Freud today," Flieger writes, "reminds us of the complications of the Sphinx's riddle, the enigma that Oedipus only thought he solved: the question of what it is to be human. Psychoanalysis continues to pose that question at the crossroads between instincts and their vicissitudes."
Download or read book Creating Second Lives written by Astrid Ensslin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to provide insights into how ‘second lives’ in the sense of virtual identities and communities are constructed textually, semiotically and discursively, specifically in the online environment Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games such as World of Warcraft. The book’s philosophy is multi-disciplinary and its goal is to explore the question of how we as gamers and residents of virtual worlds construct alternative online realities in a variety of ways. Of particular significance to this endeavour are conceptions of the body in cyberspace and of spatiality, which manifests itself in ‘natural’ and built environments as well as the triad of space, place and landscape. The contributors’ disciplinary backgrounds include media, communication, cultural and literary studies, and they examine issues of reception and production, identity, community, gender, spatiality, natural and built environments using a plethora of methodological approaches ranging from theoretical and philosophical contemplation through social semiotics to corpus-based discourse analysis.
Download or read book Jacques Lacan written by Slavoj Žižek and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacques Lacan (1901-1980) is undoubtedly the central figure of psychoanalysis in the second half of the 20th century. The texts selected here present the entire scope of the Lacan debate.
Download or read book Ecosophical Aesthetics written by Patricia MacCormack and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the ecosophical writings of Felix Guattari, this book explores the many ways that aesthetics – in the forms of visual art, film, sculpture, painting, literature, and the screenplay – can act as catalysts, allowing us to see the world differently, beyond traditional modes of representation. This is in direct parallel to Guattari's own attempt to break down the 19th century Kantian dialectic between man, art, and world, in favour of a non-hierarchical, transversal approach, to produce a more ethical and ecologically sensitive world view. Each chapter author analyses artworks which critique capitalism's industrial devastation of the environment, while at the same time offering affirmative, imaginative futures suggested by art. Including contributions from philosophers, film theorists and artists, this book asks: How can we interact with the world in a non-dominant and non-destructive way? How can art catalyze new ethical relations with non-human entities and the environment? And, crucially, what part can philosophy play in rethinking these structures of interaction?
Download or read book The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema written by Linda Ruth Williams and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This bold and original book examines in detail a relatively new genre of film--the erotic thriller. Linda Ruth Williams traces the genre's exploitation of pornography and noir, discusses mainstream stars (including Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone) as well as genre-branded direct-to-video stars, charts the work of key producers and directors, and considers home videos as a distinct form of viewing pleasure. She maps the history of the genre, analyzing hundreds of movies from blockbusters such as Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, and In the Cut to straight-to-video film titles such as Carnal Crimes, Sins of Desire, and Night Eyes. Williams's witty and illuminating readings tell the story of this sensational genre and contribute to the analysis of mainstream screen sex--and its censorship--at the beginning of the 21st century. She shows that as the erotic thriller plays out the sexual fantasies of contemporary America, it also provides a vehicle for marketing those fantasies globally.
Download or read book The Economy of Esteem written by Geoffrey Brennan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-03-18 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: However much people want esteem, it is an untradable commodity— there is no way that you can buy the good opinion of another or sell to others your good opinion of them. And yet esteem is allocated in society according to systematic determinants: people's performance, publicity, and presentation relative to others will help to fix how much esteem they enjoy and how much disesteem they avoid. In turn, rational individuals are bound to compete with one another, however tacitly, in the attempt to increase their chances of winning esteem and avoiding disesteem. And this competition shapes the environments in which they each pursue esteem, setting relevant comparators and benchmarks, and determining the cost that a person must bear for obtaining a given level of esteem. Hidden in the multifarious interactions and exchanges of social life, then, there is a quiet force at work — a force as silent and powerful as gravity — which molds the basic form of people's relationships and associations. This force was more or less routinely invoked in the writings of classical theorists like Aristotle and Plato, Locke and Montesquieu, Mandeville and Hume and Madison. Although Adam Smith himself gave it great credence, however, the rise of economics proper coincided with a sudden decline in the attention devoted to the economy of esteem. What had been a topic of compelling interest for earlier authors fell into relative neglect throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This book is designed to reverse the trend. It begins by outlining the psychology of esteem and the way the working of that psychology can give rise to an economy. It then shows how a variety of social patterns that are otherwise anomalous come to make a lot of sense within an economics of esteem. And it looks, finally, at the ways in which the economy of esteem may be reshaped to improve overall social outcomes. While making connections with older patterns of social theorising, it offers a novel orientation for contemporary thought about how society works and how it may be made to work. It puts the economy of esteem firmly on the agenda of economics and social science and of moral and political theory.
