Remainders of the American Century
Remainders of the American Century

Author: Brent Ryan Bellamy

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Published: 2021-03-08

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0819580333

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This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world. "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." —Gerry Canavan, author of Octavia E. Butler

Remainders
Remainders

Author: Margaret Ronda

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2018-03-20

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1503604896

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A literary history of the Great Acceleration, Remainders examines an archive of postwar American poetry that reflects on new dimensions of ecological crisis. These poems portray various forms of remainders—from obsolescent goods and waste products to atmospheric pollution and melting glaciers—that convey the ecological consequences of global economic development. While North American ecocriticism has tended to focus on narrative forms in its investigations of environmental consciousness and ethics, Margaret Ronda highlights the ways that poetry explores other dimensions of ecological relationships. The poems she considers engage in more ambivalent ways with the problem of human agency and the limits of individual perception, and they are attuned to the melancholic and damaging aspects of environmental existence in a time of generalized crisis. Her method, which emphasizes the material histories and uneven effects of capitalist development, models a unique critical approach to understanding the causes and conditions of ongoing biospheric catastrophe.

American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction

Author: Robert Yeates

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-11-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1800080980

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Visions of the American city in post-apocalyptic ruin permeate literary and popular fiction, across print, visual, audio and digital media. American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction explores the prevalence of these representations in American culture, drawing from a wide range of primary and critical works from the early-twentieth century to today. Beginning with science fiction in literary magazines, before taking in radio dramas, film, video games and expansive transmedia franchises, Robert Yeates argues that post-apocalyptic representations of the American city are uniquely suited for explorations of contemporary urban issues. Examining how the post-apocalyptic American city has been repeatedly adapted and repurposed to new and developing media over the last century, this book reveals that the content and form of such texts work together to create vivid and immersive fictional spaces in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Chapters present media-specific analyses of these texts, situating them within their historical contexts and the broader history of representations of urban ruins in American fiction. Original in its scope and cross-media approach, American Cities in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction both illuminates little-studied texts and provides provocative new readings of familiar works such as Blade Runner and The Walking Dead, placing them within the larger historical context of imaginings of the American city in ruins.

This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook
This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook

Author: Mark Bould

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 191598310X

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Science fiction as a vital bridge between technoscience and culture, an early warning system, a method for imagining differently. In the new millennium, science fiction has moved from the margins to the mainstream. At the same time, it has undergone massive transformations. No longer can it be derided as indigestible technobabble or escapist trash or a white man’s playground—not that it ever really was. Sf is rich and diverse, serious, and fun. A vital bridge between technoscience and culture, it is an early warning system, a method for imagining differently, and a way of experiencing our increasingly science-fictional world. It is the vernacular of the 21st century. This Is Not A Science Fiction Textbook brings together leading sf scholars, including some of the most exciting new critical voices, to introduce the genre for the general reader. Its first part outlines some key ideas used to think about sf, such as Estrangement, Extrapolation, and Alterity. Its second part maps some of the genre’s global history, from the Enlightenment and European colonialism to Indigenous and African Futurisms. Its third part surveys sf at the turn of the 2020s, organised by concepts, movements and new academic disciplines, from Afrofuturism and Animal Studies to Queer Theory and the Weird—and each chapter, whether it is on Climate Fiction or Neurodiversity, is accompanied by an introduction to a major contemporary novel and film.

Energy Humanities
Energy Humanities

Author: Imre Szeman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2017-04-22

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 1421421895

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"Energy humanities is a field of scholarship that, like medical humanities and digital humanities before it, overcomes traditional boundaries between the disciplines and between academic and applied research. Like its predecessors, energy humanities highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the human sciences can make to areas of study and analysis once thought best left to the natural sciences. This isn't a case of the humanities simply helping their cross-campus colleagues to learn the mechanics of communication so that they might better articulate their ideas. Rather, these fields of scholarship are ones that demonstrate how the scale and complexity of the issues being explored demand insights and approaches that transcend old school disciplinary boundaries. Energy Humanities : A Reader offers a carefully curated selection of the best and most influential work in energy humanities that has appeared over the past decade. To stay true to the diverse work that makes up this emergent field, selections range from anthropology and geography to philosophy, history, and cultural studies to recent energy-focused interventions in art and literature. The three readers all agree that this is an important, ground-breaking collection of work"--Provided by publisher.

Land of Strangers
Land of Strangers

Author: Ash Amin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-24

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 0745660622

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The impersonality of social relationships in the society of strangers is making majorities increasingly nostalgic for a time of closer personal ties and strong community moorings. The constitutive pluralism and hybridity of modern living in the West is being rejected in an age of heightened anxiety over the future and drummed up aversion towards the stranger. Minorities, migrants and dissidents are expected to stay away, or to conform and integrate, as they come to be framed in an optic of the social as interpersonal or communitarian. Judging these developments as dangerous, this book offers a counter-argument by looking to relations that are not reducible to local or social ties in order to offer new suggestions for living in diversity and for forging a different politics of the stranger. The book explains the balance between positive and negative public feelings as the synthesis of habits of interaction in varied spaces of collective being, from the workplace and urban space, to intimate publics and tropes of imagined community. The book proposes a series of interventions that make for public being as both unconscious habit and cultivated craft of negotiating difference, radiating civilities of situated attachment and indifference towards the strangeness of others. It is in the labour of cultivating the commons in a variety of ways that Amin finds the elements for a new politics of diversity appropriate for our times, one that takes the stranger as there, unavoidable, an equal claimant on ground that is not pre-allocated.

Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology
Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology

Author: Tilottama Rajan

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 9780804745024

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This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction's continuing relevance. The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its "constitutive loss" of phenomenology (in Judith Butler's phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre's forgotten but seminal Being and Nothingness) is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought.

Stoner
Stoner

Author: John Williams

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1590179285

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"Born the child of a poor farmer in Missouri, William Stoner is urged by his parents to study new agriculture techniques at the state university. Digging instead into the texts of Milton and Shakespeare, Stoner falls under the spell of the unexpected pleasures of English literature, and decides to make it his life. Stoner is the story of that life"--

The Remainder
The Remainder

Author: Alia Trabucco Zerán

Publisher: Coffee House Press

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 136

ISBN-13: 1566895588

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Longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Felipe and Iquela, two young friends in modern day Santiago, live in the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship. Felipe prowls the streets counting dead bodies real and imagined, aspiring to a perfect number that might offer closure. Iquela and Paloma, an old acquaintance from Iquela’s childhood, search for a way to reconcile their fragile lives with their parents’ violent militant past. The body of Paloma’s mother gets lost in transit, sending the three on a pisco-fueled journey up the cordillera as they confront the pain that stretches across generations.

Living a Marxist Life
Living a Marxist Life

Author: Andrew Pendakis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-09-19

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1350420891

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The last ten years have seen a dramatic upsurge of interest in socialist theory and politics. As a recent Washington Post op-ed put it, “We are living in a new social democratic moment”. People are increasingly drawn to Marxist theory but find it difficult to imagine how it can be integrated practically into an everyday life pervaded by capitalist norms and social practices. Often intuitively, they agree with Marx's critique of capitalism, but don't know how to bridge the gap between their sense of dissatisfaction with the present and a revolutionary solution which can feel indefinitely postponed and remote. Living a Marxist Life responds to this disconnect by framing Marxism not as a mere “theory” but as a practical philosophical truth-a lived practice that immediately changes the reality of those experimenting with it. From Frida Kahlo to Jean-Luc Godard, Pablo Picasso to Angela Davis, Marxists are not dry theoreticians but embodied agents of a process that is as intensely imaginative and joyful as it is demanding and difficult. This book, then, is a chronicle of radical change-a record of the ways our thoughts, habits, desires, actions, and emotions can be fundamentally reshaped by an encounter with Marx. This book is not an introduction to Marx, nor a systematic defense of Marxism. Rather, it is a self-help book that calls into question the very idea of self-help, a guide to the good life that rejects normative morality, and an inspirational manual that promotes philosophy, sociology, and politics, not vague spirituality or religion, as solutions to the urgent problems that face us.