Surreal Entanglements

Surreal Entanglements
Author: Louise Economides
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000388344

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

The traumatic surreal

The traumatic surreal
Author: Patricia Allmer
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1526149788

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War. Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement’s relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zürn, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period.

Entanglement

Entanglement
Author: Cass Lennox
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2022-05-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1626499616

Love is worth a galaxy of trouble. Pann is a teeming city on the edge of habitable space, the final stop between a hostile Parliament and the safety of another solar system. Renée Bellevue, prefect of Pann’s police service and disgraced exile, has her hands full. That is, if she remembers to work and isn’t distracted by Lane, her favourite enigmatic bar owner. When a politician arrives on-planet to investigate a murder and capture two infamous activists, Renée knows trouble is incoming. Looking the other way will earn her a clean slate and return passage home—at a price that grows steeper each day. As an unwelcome “mod”—a human with implanted tech—Lane Kovacs fled to Pann with her sister. Running a bar isn’t the best use of her scientific background, but it’s mindless and uncomplicated. Until she’s stuck with a priceless ticket out, her thieving ex reappears, and a scheming Parliamentarian monitors her every move. Her ex offers escape and freedom. Tempting, if not for Renée, the unexpected emotional variable upsetting the equation. One misstep means arrest or death, but hope beckons bright as the stars. Lane and Renée must decide what they really want, even if it means parting for good. FINALIST - Foreword Reviews INDIES book awards - Romance 2022 **See this title's page on RiptidePublishing.com for content warnings.**

Poetry & Language Writing

Poetry & Language Writing
Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2007-11-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1781388083

It has been variously labelled ‘Language Poetry’, ‘Language Writing’, ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing’ (after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and ‘language-centred writing’. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that ‘it’ has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry, reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding the movement. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten.

States of Entanglement

States of Entanglement
Author: Sven Anderson
Publisher: Actar D, Inc.
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2021-07-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1638409692

Investigates how data production and consumption territorialize the physical landscape filtered through Ireland’s role in global communications and, as told by the Irish Pavilion at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, features an installation that focuses on the materiality of data infrastructure in space. As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data production and highlight the myth that information technologies are hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape. The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure. In 1866, the world’s first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo Marconi transmitted some of the world’s first wireless radio messages from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today, Dublin has overtaken London as the data centre hub of Europe, hosting 25% of all available European server space. And by the year 2027, data centres are forecast to consume a third of Ireland’s total electricity demand. The book aims to raise awareness around the hardware of the global internet and Cloud services, which is interwoven with the Irish landscape—made manifest through the vast constellation of data centres, fibre optic cable networks, and energy grids that have come to populate its cities and suburbs over recent decades. The publication accompanies and supports Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale by archiving the production of the pavilion filtered through a series of poetic excerpts that describe the form, components, content and furniture that make up the installation. At the same time the book is conceived as more than just a catalog by positioning some of the cultural and spatial implications of data technologies in Ireland within a more universal context through contributions by ANNEX, the team selected to produce the pavilion, as well as invited contributors from the disciplines of Media Theory; Journalism; Computer Science, Geography; History and Architecture.

Transformed States

Transformed States
Author: Martin Halliwell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1978817886

Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century. The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar. By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyzes thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested. Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of COVID-19.

Dada & Surrealism A&i

Dada & Surrealism A&i
Author: Matthew Gale
Publisher: Phaidon Press
Total Pages: 464
Release: 1997-11-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780714832616

A stimulating introduction to this 20th-century art movement.

The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia

The Postworld In-Between Utopia and Dystopia
Author: Katarzyna Ostalska
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2021-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000509966

This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Darwin's Screens

Darwin's Screens
Author: Barbara Creed
Publisher: Academic Monographs
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-10-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780522860023

Darwin's Screens addresses a major gap in film scholarship—the key influence of Charles Darwin's theories on the history of the cinema. Much has been written on the effect of other great thinkers such as Freud and Marx but very little on the important role played by Darwinian ideas on the evolution of the newest art form of the twentieth century. Creed argues that Darwinian ideas influenced the evolution of early film genres such as horror, the detective film, science fiction, film noir and the musical. Her study draws on Darwin's theories of sexual selection, deep time and transformation, and on emotions, death, and the meaning of human and animal in order to rethink some of the canonical arguments of film and cinema studies.

Narrating Nonhuman Spaces

Narrating Nonhuman Spaces
Author: Marco Caracciolo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2021-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000441555

Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.