Download or read book Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion written by Gregory Erickson and published by . This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book explores the concept that, as participation in traditional religion declines, the complex and fantastical worlds of speculative television have become the place where theological questions and issues are negotiated, understood, and formed. From bodies, robots, and souls to purgatories and post-apocalyptic scenarios and new forms of digital scripture, the shows examined - from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Westworld - invite their viewers and fans to engage with and imagine concepts traditionally reserved for religious spaces. Informed by recent trends in both fan studies and religious studies, and with an emphasis on practice as well as belief, the thematically focused narrative posits that it is through the intersections of these shows that we find the reframing and rethinking of religious ideas. This truly interdisciplinary work will resonate with scholars and upper-level students in the areas of religion, television studies, popular culture, fan studies, media studies, and philosophy"--

Download or read book Speculative Television and the Doing and Undoing of Religion written by Gregory Erickson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-09-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the concept that, as participation in traditional religion declines, the complex and fantastical worlds of speculative television have become the place where theological questions and issues are negotiated, understood, and formed. From bodies, robots, and souls to purgatories and post-apocalyptic scenarios and new forms of digital scripture, the shows examined – from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Westworld – invite their viewers and fans to engage with and imagine concepts traditionally reserved for religious spaces. Informed by recent trends in both fan studies and religious studies, and with an emphasis on practice as well as belief, the thematically focused narrative posits that it is through the intersections of these shows that we find the reframing and rethinking of religious ideas. This truly interdisciplinary work will resonate with scholars and upper-level students in the areas of religion, television studies, popular culture, fan studies, media studies, and philosophy.

Download or read book Television s Streaming Wars written by Arienne Ferchaud and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-03 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses contemporary debates and trends regarding the production and distribution, content, and audience engagement with the television streaming industry. The book interrogates the economics and structure of the industry, questions the types and diversity of content perpetuated on streaming services, and addresses how audiences engage with content from US and global perspectives and within various research paradigms. Chapters address television streaming wars, including the debates and trends in terms of its production and competition, diversity and growth of programming, and audience consumption, focusing on multiple platforms, content, and users. This timely and creative volume will interest students and scholars working in television studies, media industry studies, popular culture studies, audience studies, media psychology, critical cultural studies and media economics.

Download or read book Television Directors Race and Gender written by Jonathan J. Cavallero and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the predominant framing of US television as a writer’s or producer’s medium by suggesting that television directors are a vital component of TV artistry. Looking beyond a perspective that favors the narrative and economic aspects of television but undervalues the medium’s formal elements, the book explores how directors use the visual and aural to contribute layers of meaning that add to the thematic development of television texts. Starting from the belief that television aesthetics partially reveal the ways in which directors (and their collaborators) contribute to the overall thematic development of a program, the author offers five case studies that map out the ways that directors have contributed to television drama throughout the medium’s approximately 80-year history. By devoting special attention to the presence and voices of directors from marginalized backgrounds, the book creates opportunities to discuss television from perspectives that emphasize issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. This original and insightful work will appeal to students and scholars of television studies, television production and media production, critical media studies, media authorship, gender studies, and race and media.

Download or read book Television Sitcom and Cultural Crisis written by Holly Willson Holladay and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume demonstrates that television comedies are conduits through which we might resist normative ways of thinking about cultural crises. By drawing on Gramscian notion of crisis and the understanding that crises are overlapping, interconnected, and mutually constitutive, the essays in this collection demonstrate that situation comedies do more than make us laugh; they also help us understand the complexities of our social world’s moments of crisis. Each chapter takes up the televisual representation of a modern cultural crisis in a contemporary sitcom and is grounded in the extensive body of literature that suggests that levity is a powerful mechanism to make sense of and cope with these difficult cultural experiences. Divided into thematic sections that highlight crises of institutions and systems, identity and representation, and speculation and futurism, this book will interest scholars of media and cultural studies, political economy, communication studies, and humor studies.

Download or read book Post heritage Perspectives on British Period Drama Television written by Will Stanford Abbiss and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-09 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing upon the existing scholarship of period drama and emerging research into new media ecologies, instigated by television streaming services such as Netflix, this book establishes a critical framework for understanding the representation of nationhood and cultural identity in television drama. By formalising the term ‘post-heritage’ the book proposes a methodology which recognises the interplay of traditional and innovative elements within period drama productions. The book applies this critical perspective to popular British period drama productions from the 2010s, with examples including The Crown, the ‘society dramas’ of Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey, Steven Knight’s Dickens adaptations, and Stephen Poliakoff’s recent oeuvre, to demonstrate the benefits of evaluating period drama as part of twenty-first century television’s developments. It challenges the assumptions around characteristics and ideological purpose that period drama discourse often contends with, and offers new perspectives on understanding the past through televisual representations. This book will be important reading for students and scholars of television studies, film studies and cultural studies.

Download or read book The New Audience for Old TV written by Alexander H. Beare and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-11-18 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2020-21, the classic HBO show The Sopranos (1999-2007) saw a rapid increase in viewership and was proclaimed to be one of the “hottest shows of lockdown” by outlets like The Guardian and GQ. This resurgent popularity of The Sopranos raises important analytical questions for media scholars—how do audiences understand a complex text like The Sopranos in a radically different televisual and cultural context? Did they adapt the show to fit the particularities of the present moment or was it simply a nostalgic escape from the bleak conditions of the pandemic? Perhaps most importantly though, did the distinct televisual environment of the 2020s bring with it markedly new ways for audiences to understand ‘old’ shows? The New Audience for Old TV is the first book to investigate how audiences re-read and re-interpret resurgent shows when watching in new cultural contexts. Based on a series of original research interviews with young fans, it considers how new contexts of interpretation, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Subscription Video on Demand (SVOD), and post #MeToo gender politics, informed the unique experience of watching. Using the metaphor of the anamorphic painting, it introduces the analytical framework of a ‘retrospective reading’ to reveal the new meanings that are being made available for ‘old’ TV. Ultimately, The New Audience for Old TV uncovers fresh insights into audiences’ experiences with ‘prestige’ TV and the new avenues of meaning-making in the age of streaming.

Download or read book Netflix Dark Fantastic Genres and Intergenerational Viewing written by Djoymi Baker and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on Netflix’s child and family-orientated platform exclusive content, this book offers the first exploration of a controversial genre cycle of dark science fiction, horror, and fantasy television under Netflix’s "Family Watch Together TV" tag. Using a ground-breaking mix of methods including audience research, interface, and textual analysis, the book demonstrates how Netflix is producing dark family telefantasy content that is both reshaping child and family-friendly TV genres and challenging earlier broadcast TV models around child-appropriate family viewing. It illuminates how Netflix encourages family audiences to "watch together" through intergenerational dynamics that work on and offscreen. The chapters in this book explore how this "Netflixication" of family television developed across landmark examples including Stranger Things, A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, and even Squid Game. The book outlines how Netflix is consolidating a new dark family terrain in the streaming sector, which is unsettling older concepts of family viewing, leading to considerable audience and critical confusion around target audiences and viewer expectations. This book will be of particular interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in the fields of television studies, screen genre studies, childhood studies, and cultural studies.

Download or read book The Hired Girl written by Laura Amy Schlitz and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction A 2016 Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Award Winner Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz brings her delicious wit and keen eye to early twentieth-century America in a moving yet comedic tour de force. Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs, just like the heroines in her beloved novels, yearns for real life and true love. But what hope is there for adventure, beauty, or art on a hardscrabble farm in Pennsylvania where the work never ends? Over the summer of 1911, Joan pours her heart out into her diary as she seeks a new, better life for herself—because maybe, just maybe, a hired girl cleaning and cooking for six dollars a week can become what a farm girl could only dream of—a woman with a future. Newbery Medalist Laura Amy Schlitz relates Joan’s journey from the muck of the chicken coop to the comforts of a society household in Baltimore (Electricity! Carpet sweepers! Sending out the laundry!), taking readers on an exploration of feminism and housework; religion and literature; love and loyalty; cats, hats, and bunions.

Download or read book Imaginal Reality written by Aaron B. Daniels and published by Aeon Books. This book was released on 2011-10-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is Volume Two of Imaginal Reality, a work that has been described as "The finest book on contemporary existential magic I've ever read" (George Holochwost, Magus (1), Illuminates of Thanateros).Readers will dive deeper into the imagination of magic and learn to develop the fictional gaze necessary to claim authority and authorship of their lives. This second volume contains an extensive glossary of over 300 scholarly entries on esotericism, existentialism, psychology, and the magical revival.This volume moves more explicitly into the practice of magic - that is, the ongoing journey of claiming our lives more fully and deeply. This cultivation of intentionality and vision, though never a one-time decisive victory, can become a more habitual attitude. To gird these hard-fought realizations, this volume presents the other four voids - Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Freedom and Responsibility, and Change and Finitude - in detail.

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Download or read book Damn Great Empires written by Alexander Livingston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass -- his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines -- as the key to unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the conventional view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with a transatlantic critique of modernity, as well as with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.

Download or read book Michigan Manufacturer and Financial Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Why Waco written by James D. Tabor and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1993 government assault on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, resulted in the deaths of four federal agents and eighty Branch Davidians, including seventeen children. Whether these tragic deaths could have been avoided is still debatable, but what seems clear is that the events in Texas have broad implications for religious freedom in America. James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher's bold examination of the Waco story offers the first balanced account of the siege. They try to understand what really happened in Waco: What brought the Branch Davidians to Mount Carmel? Why did the government attack? How did the media affect events? The authors address the accusations of illegal weapons possession, strange sexual practices, and child abuse that were made against David Koresh and his followers. Without attempting to excuse such actions, they point out that the public has not heard the complete story and that many media reports were distorted. The authors have carefully studied the Davidian movement, analyzing the theology and biblical interpretation that were so central to the group's functioning. They also consider how two decades of intense activity against so-called cults have influenced public perceptions of unorthodox religions. In exploring our fear of unconventional religious groups and how such fear curtails our ability to tolerate religious differences, Why Waco? is an unsettling wake-up call. Using the events at Mount Carmel as a cautionary tale, the authors challenge all Americans, including government officials and media representatives, to closely examine our national commitment to religious freedom.

Download or read book Thomas Jefferson s Qur an written by Denise Spellberg and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and illuminating book, Denise A. Spellberg reveals a little-known but crucial dimension of the story of American religious freedom—a drama in which Islam played a surprising role. In 1765, eleven years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur’an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America. But unlike most of them, by 1776 Jefferson could imagine Muslims as future citizens of his new country. Based on groundbreaking research, Spellberg compellingly recounts how a handful of the Founders, Jefferson foremost among them, drew upon Enlightenment ideas about the toleration of Muslims (then deemed the ultimate outsiders in Western society) to fashion out of what had been a purely speculative debate a practical foundation for governance in America. In this way, Muslims, who were not even known to exist in the colonies, became the imaginary outer limit for an unprecedented, uniquely American religious pluralism that would also encompass the actual despised minorities of Jews and Catholics. The rancorous public dispute concerning the inclusion of Muslims, for which principle Jefferson’s political foes would vilify him to the end of his life, thus became decisive in the Founders’ ultimate judgment not to establish a Protestant nation, as they might well have done. As popular suspicions about Islam persist and the numbers of American Muslim citizenry grow into the millions, Spellberg’s revelatory understanding of this radical notion of the Founders is more urgent than ever. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an is a timely look at the ideals that existed at our country’s creation, and their fundamental implications for our present and future.

Download or read book Abortion Politics written by Ziad Munson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-05-21 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abortion has remained one of the most volatile and polarizing issues in the United States for over four decades. Americans are more divided today than ever over abortion, and this debate colors the political, economic, and social dynamics of the country. This book provides a balanced, clear-eyed overview of the abortion debate, including the perspectives of both the pro-life and pro-choice movements. It covers the history of the debate from colonial times to the present, the mobilization of mass movements around the issue, the ways it is understood by ordinary Americans, the impact it has had on US political development, and the differences between the abortion conflict in the US and the rest of the world. Throughout these discussions, Ziad Munson demonstrates how the meaning of abortion has shifted to reflect the changing anxieties and cultural divides which it has come to represent. Abortion Politics is an invaluable companion for exploring the abortion issue and what it has to say about American society, as well as the dramatic changes in public understanding of women’s rights, medicine, religion, and partisanship.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of World Religions written by Robert S. Ellwood and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains nearly 600 brief entries on the world's religious traditions.