Download or read book The Financial Imaginary written by Alison Shonkwiler and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-02-14 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by neoliberalism and globalization, increasing financial abstraction has presented a new political urgency for contemporary writers. Globalized finance, the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and the emergence of new technologies pose a similar challenge to the one faced by American social realists a century ago: making the virtualization of capitalism legible within the conventions of the realist novel. In The Financial Imaginary, Alison Shonkwiler reads texts by Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Teddy Wayne, and Mohsin Hamid to examine how fiction confronts the formal and representational mystifications of the economic. As Shonkwiler shows, these contemporary writers navigate the social, moral, and class preoccupations of American “economic fiction” (as shaped by such writers as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser), even as they probe the novel’s inadequacies to tell the story of an increasingly abstract world system. Drawing a connection from historical and theoretical accounts of financialization to the formal contours of contemporary fiction, The Financial Imaginary examines the persistent yet vexed relationship between financial representation and the demands of literary realism. It argues that the novel is essential to understanding our relation to the mystifications of abstraction past and present.
Download or read book The Imaginary App written by Paul D. Miller and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mobile app as technique and imaginary tool, offering a shortcut to instantaneous connection and entertainment. Mobile apps promise to deliver (h)appiness to our devices at the touch of a finger or two. Apps offer gratifyingly immediate access to connection and entertainment. The array of apps downloadable from the app store may come from the cloud, but they attach themselves firmly to our individual movement from location to location on earth. In The Imaginary App, writers, theorists, and artists—including Stephen Wolfram (in conversation with Paul Miller) and Lev Manovich—explore the cultural and technological shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the mobile app. These contributors and interviewees see apps variously as “a machine of transcendence,” “a hulking wound in our nervous system,” or “a promise of new possibilities.” They ask whether the app is an object or a relation, and if it could be a “metamedium” that supersedes all other artistic media. They consider the control and power exercised by software architecture; the app's prosthetic ability to enhance certain human capacities, in reality or in imagination; the app economy, and the divergent possibilities it offers of making a living or making a fortune; and the app as medium and remediator of reality. Also included (and documented in color) are selected projects by artists asked to design truly imaginary apps, “icons of the impossible.” These include a female sexual arousal graph using Doppler images; “The Ultimate App,” which accepts a payment and then closes, without providing information or functionality; and “iLuck,” which uses GPS technology and four-leaf-clover icons to mark places where luck might be found. Contributors Christian Ulrik Andersen, Thierry Bardini, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Benjamin H. Bratton, Drew S. Burk, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Robbie Cormier, Dock Currie, Dal Yong Jin, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ryan and Hays Holladay, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, Eric Kluitenberg, Lev Manovich, Vincent Manzerolle, Svitlana Matviyenko, Dan Mellamphy, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Steven Millward, Anna Munster, Søren Bro Pold, Chris Richards, Scott Snibbe, Nick Srnicek, Stephen Wolfram
Download or read book The Imaginary written by A.F. Harrold and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now an animated feature film on Netflix! Perfect for fans of Coraline and Roald Dahl, this fully-illustrated journey into the secret world of imaginary friends is quirky, dark, and utterly irresistible. Rudger is Amanda Shuffleup's imaginary friend. Nobody else can see Rudger-until the evil Mr. Bunting arrives at Amanda's door. Mr. Bunting hunts imaginaries. Rumor has it that he even eats them. And now he's found Rudger. Soon Rudger is alone, and running for his imaginary life. He needs to find Amanda before Mr. Bunting catches him-and before Amanda forgets him and he fades away to nothing. But how can an unreal boy stand alone in the real world? Featuring gorgeous illustrations and a beautiful design, this suspenseful fantasy tells a powerful tale of friendship, imagination, and remembering what you never knew you lost.
Download or read book Cultures of Financialization written by M. Haiven and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-10 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Cultures of Financialization argues that, in our age of crisis, the global economy is more invested than ever in culture and the imagination. We must take the idea of 'fictitious capital' seriously as a way to understand the power of finance, and what might be done to stop it.
Download or read book The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction written by Paul Crosthwaite and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary British and American fiction is defined by financial markets' power over the global publishing industry and the global economy.
Download or read book Imaginary Cities written by Darran Anderson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-04-06 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”
Download or read book Money written by Jacob Goldstein and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs. Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century. At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin. One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad. Lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today.
Download or read book The Illiberal Imagination written by Joe Shapiro and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-11-13 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Illiberal Imagination offers a synthetic, historical formalist account of how—and to what end—U.S. novels from the late eighteenth century to the mid-1850s represented economic inequality and radical forms of economic egalitarianism in the new nation. In conversation with intellectual, social, and labor history, this study tracks the representation of class inequality and conflict across five subgenres of the early U.S. novel: the Bildungsroman, the episodic travel narrative, the sentimental novel, the frontier romance, and the anti-slavery novel. Through close readings of the works of foundational U.S. novelists, including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fenimore Cooper, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joe Shapiro demonstrates that while voices of economic egalitarianism and working-class protest find their ways into a variety of early U.S. novels, these novels are anything but radically dialogic; instead, he argues, they push back against emergent forms of class consciousness by working to naturalize class inequality among whites. The Illiberal Imagination thus enhances our understanding of both the early U.S. novel and the history of the way that class has been imagined in the United States.
Download or read book Complex Systems Modeling and Simulation in Economics and Finance written by Shu-Heng Chen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title brings together frontier research on complex economic systems, heterogeneous interacting agents, bounded rationality, and nonlinear dynamics in economics. The book contains the proceedings of the CEF2015 (21st Computing in Economics in Finance), held 20-22 June 2015 in Taipei, Taiwan, and addresses some of the important driving forces for various emergent properties in economies, when viewed as complex systems. The breakthroughs reported in this book are a result of an interdisciplinary approach and simulation remains the unifying theme for these papers as they deal with a wide range of topics in economics. The text is a valuable addition to the efforts in promoting the complex systems view in economic science. The computational experiments reported in the book are both transparent and replicable. Complex System Modeling and Simulation in Economics and Finance is useful for graduate courses of complex systems, with particular focus on economics and finance. At the same time it serves as a good overview for researchers who are interested in the topic.
Download or read book The Internet Myth written by Paolo Bory and published by University of Westminster Press. This book was released on 2020-04-29 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.’ — Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challenges the myth laying at the foundations of the network ideologies – the idea that networks, by themselves, are the main agents of social, economic, political and cultural change. By comparing and integrating different sources related to network histories, this book emphasizes how a dominant narrative has extensively contributed to the construction of the Internet myth while other visions of the networked society have been erased from the collective imaginary. The book decodes, analyzes and challenges the foundations of the network ideologies looking at how networks have been imagined, designed and promoted during the crucial phase of the 1990s. Three case studies are scrutinized so as to reveal the complexity of network imaginaries in this decade: the birth of the Web and the mythopoesis of its inventor; and the histories of two Italian networking projects, the infrastructural plan Socrate and the civic network Iperbole, the first to give free Internet access to citizens. The Internet Myth thereby provides a compelling and hidden sociohistorical narrative in order to challenge one of the most powerful myths of our time. This title has been published with the financial assistance of the Fondazione Hilda e Felice Vitali, Lugano, Switzerland.
Download or read book Imaginary Futures written by Richard Barbrook and published by Pluto Press (UK). This book was released on 2007-04-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.
Download or read book Imaginary Friend written by Stephen Chbosky and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instant New York Times Bestseller One of Fall 2019's Best Books (People, EW, Lithub, Vox, Washington Post, and more) A young boy is haunted by a voice in his head in this acclaimed epic of literary horror from the author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Christopher is seven years old.Christopher is the new kid in town.Christopher has an imaginary friend. We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us. Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out. At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six long days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again. Twenty years ago, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower made readers everywhere feel infinite. Now, Chbosky has returned with an epic work of literary horror, years in the making, whose grand scale and rich emotion redefine the genre. Read it with the lights on.
Download or read book IMAGINARY WORLD written by SANMEET K SETHI and published by BOOKSQUIRREL. This book was released on 2021-12-25 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “THE IMAGINARY WORLD” is all about love and life. Everyone has experienced betrayal in their life but not everyone has seen true love… it’s not easy. This book brings many writers together to show how love feels, with society issues in their way. I am very grateful to have so many amazing writers by my side, and I would like to thank each and every person present in this book and also those who aren’t. My Parents for supporting me in this and my best friend Jeet Kakkar for making me strong enough and believing in me that I can do this, I love you. Lastly, A big Thank you to TOC for this opportunity and Somya Dii our project head for holding my hand the whole time, it wouldn’t have been possible without you. Make the world a better place With your smile… Live life with no regrets Love life with no debts. ~ Sanmeet K Sethi
Download or read book Good Faith written by Jane Smiley and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2003-04-22 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres comes a “smashing...fascinating” novel (The New York Times Book Review) that conjures all the American obsessions of the 1980s: sex, greed, envy, real estate, and the American dream. In her subversively funny and genuinely moving new novel, Jane Smiley nails down several American preoccupations with the expertise of a master carpenter. Forthright, likable Joe Stratford is the kind of local businessman everybody trusts, for good reason. But it’s 1982, and even in Joe’s small town, values are in upheaval: not just property values, either. Enter Marcus Burns, a would-be master of the universe whose years with the IRS have taught him which rules are meant to be broken. Before long he and Joe are new best friends—and partners in an investment venture so complex that no one may ever understand it. Add to this Joe’s roller coaster affair with his mentor’s married daughter. The result is as suspenseful and entertaining as any of Jane Smiley’s fiction.
Download or read book The Imaginary Revolution written by Michael M. Seidman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events of 1968 have been seen as a decisive turning point in the Western world. The author takes a critical look at "May 1968" and questions whether the events were in fact as "revolutionary" as French and foreign commentators have indicated. He concludes the student movement changed little that had not already been challenged and altered in the late fifties and early sixties. The workers' strikes led to fewer working hours and higher wages, but these reforms reflected the secular demands of the French labor movement. "May 1968" was remarkable not because of the actual transformations it wrought but rather by virtue of the revolutionary power that much of the media and most scholars have attributed to it and which turned it into a symbol of a youthful, renewed, and freer society in France and beyond.
Download or read book Complexity and the Economy written by W. Brian Arthur and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of previous published papers by the author on the subject of complexity economics, appearing from the 1980s to the present.
Download or read book History in Financial Times written by Amin Samman and published by Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times. This book was released on 2019 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pushing beyond linear accounts of economic history, this book reveals how the past continually circulates through and shapes the present in unexpected ways.