The Prosthetic Impulse

The Prosthetic Impulse

Author: Marquard Smith

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0262195305

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Where does the body end? Exploring the material and metaphorical borderline between flesh and its accompanying technologies.


Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

Author: Aaron Shaheen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-06-26

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0192599623

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Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and obscure American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war's mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause, and attempt to remedy, hideous injuries. Such a relationship was also evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses proved particularly resonant in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book's six chapters explain how a prosthesis's spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew or even improve upon his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his 'spirit' or personality.


Carnal Thoughts

Carnal Thoughts

Author: Vivian Sobchack

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-10-02

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0520241282

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A group of sophisticated essays on how we experience film with all fives senses--and our sense of history .


The Lives of Machines

The Lives of Machines

Author: Tamara S. Ketabgian

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2011-03-22

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0472900358

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"The Lives of Machines is intelligent, closely argued, and persuasive, and puts forth a contention that will unsettle the current consensus about Victorian attitudes toward the machine." ---Jay Clayton, Vanderbilt University Today we commonly describe ourselves as machines that "let off steam" or feel "under pressure." The Lives of Machines investigates how Victorian technoculture came to shape this language of human emotion so pervasively and irrevocably and argues that nothing is more intensely human and affecting than the nonhuman. Tamara Ketabgian explores the emergence of a modern and more mechanical view of human nature in Victorian literature and culture. Treating British literature from the 1830s to the 1870s, this study examines forms of feeling and community that combine the vital and the mechanical, the human and the nonhuman, in surprisingly hybrid and productive alliances. Challenging accounts of industrial alienation that still persist, the author defines mechanical character and feeling not as erasures or negations of self, but as robust and nuanced entities in their own right. The Lives of Machines thus offers an alternate cultural history that traces sympathies between humans, animals, and machines in novels and nonfiction about factory work as well as in other unexpected literary sites and genres, whether domestic, scientific, musical, or philosophical. Ketabgian historicizes a model of affect and community that continues to inform recent theories of technology, psychology, and the posthuman. The Lives of Machines will be of interest to students of British literature and history, history of science and of technology, novel studies, psychoanalysis, and postmodern cultural studies. Cover image: "Power Loom Factory of Thomas Robinson," from Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835), frontispiece. DIGITALCULTUREBOOKS: a collaborative imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the University of Michigan Library


Mammographies

Mammographies

Author: Mary K. DeShazer

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2018-05-09

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 0472900986

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While breast cancer continues to affect the lives of millions, contemporary writers and artists have responded to the ravages of the disease in creative expression. Mary K. DeShazer’s book looks specifically at breast cancer memoirs and photographic narratives, a category she refers to as mammographies, signifying both the imaging technology by which most Western women discover they have this disease and the documentary imperatives that drive their written and visual accounts of it. Mammographies argues that breast cancer narratives of the past ten years differ from their predecessors in their bold address of previously neglected topics such as the link between cancer and environmental carcinogens, the ethics and efficacy of genetic testing and prophylactic mastectomy, and the shifting politics of prosthesis and reconstruction. Mammographies is distinctive among studies of contemporary illness narratives in its exclusive focus on breast cancer, its analysis of both memoirs and photographic texts, its attention to hybrid and collaborative narratives, and its emphasis on ecological, genetic, transnational, queer, and anti-pink discourses. DeShazer’s methodology—best characterized as literary critical, feminist, and interdisciplinary—includes detailed interpretation of the narrative strategies, thematic contours, and visual imagery of a wide range of contemporary breast cancer memoirs and photographic anthologies. The author explores the ways in which the narratives constitute a distinctive testimonial and memorial tradition, a claim supported by close readings and theoretical analysis that demonstrates how these narratives question hegemonic cultural discourses, empower reader-viewers as empathic witnesses, and provide communal sites for mourning, resisting, and remembering.


Prosthetic Gods

Prosthetic Gods

Author: Hal Foster

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 9780262062428

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How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These "new egos" are further contrasted with the "bachelor machines" proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Godsdoes not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.


The new pornographies

The new pornographies

Author: Victoria Best

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1526162792

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The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed the striking advance of pornography into the Western cultural mainstream. Symptomatic of this development has been the use by writers, artists, and film-makers of the imagery and aesthetics of pornography, in works which have, often on this basis, achieved considerable international success. Amongst these artists are a number of French authors and directors - such as Michel Houellebecq, Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes, or Catherine Millet - whose work has often been dismissed as trashy or exploitative, but whose use of pornographic material may in fact be indicative of important contemporary concerns. In this study of a very significant trend, the authors explore how the reference to pornography encodes diverse political, cultural, and existential questions, including relations between the sexes, the collapse of avant-garde politics, gay sexualities in the time of AIDS, the anti-feminist backlash, the relation to the body and illness, the place of fantasy, and the sexualisation of children. It will be of interest to undergraduates, graduates, and researchers in the fields of French culture, gender, film and media studies.