Medusa - an experimental spaceship developed by the Advanced Research Department of St Oscar's University. Missing since it was launched, presumed lost in the wars, it was a project so secret that it has never been declassified. Now, twenty years on, Medusa is coming home. After one of the investigation team dies suspiciously, Professor Bernice Summerfield is assigned to help discover what went wrong. But to do so she must solve a riddle. What is the strange link between the original crew and the team now on board the drifting ship? And why do their ghosts still haunt Medusa?
Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy. Focusing on the recurring metaphor of Medusas head, The Medusa Effect examines images of horror in texts by Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a series of Victorian artists and critics writing about aesthetics. Through nuanced and innovative readings of canonical works by Freud, Nietzsche, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne, and George Eliot, Thomas Albrecht demonstrates the twofold nature of these writers images of horror. On the one hand, the analysis illuminates how the representation of something seen as horrifyingfor instance, a disturbing work of art, an existential insight, or a recognition of the fundamental inaccessibility of another persons consciousnesscan serve a protective purpose, to defend the writer in some way against the horror he or she encounters. On the other hand, the representations themselves can be a potential threatepistemologically unreliable, for instance, or illusory, deceptive, fundamentally unstable, and potentially dangerous to the writers. Through a psychoanalytically informed literary analysis, The Medusa Effect explores crucial ethical and epistemological questions of Victorian aesthetics, as well as underexamined complexities of the mechanisms of Victorian literary representation. an elegant study in rhetorical analysis. Victorian Studies Thomas Albrecht brings a radically different approach to aestheticspsychoanalytic and poststructuralist rather than historicistin The Medusa Effect. Studies in English Literature
In traditional mythology and iconography, Medusa's killing powers are attributed to visual means: the monster is slain for her looks and her effect is to kill men for looking at her. Challenging the familiar account of the modern era as ocularcentric, this book reads the Medusa-effect on the philosophy of the modern research university as rooted in an audiocentric fantasy. Author Dawne McCance links phonocentrism to an aural imaginary by tracking the trope—and terror—of the deaf ear and mute mouth in the discourse on the university that was inaugurated by Kant and that extends through Hegel and Heidegger to the present. She shows how, repeatedly, in founding texts on the modern research university, the philosopher's fearful recoil from an animal-female figure that he defines as deaf and dumb has the effect—the Medusa-effect—of cutting off his own, and therefore the institution's, ear and tongue. McCance also considers some recent efforts to shake the modern institution out of its Medusa-effect petrification.
I write this book as a synopsis to work out my battle with depression and also to use it as a tool to help point others in the right direction. Around 2014 and during a stay in hospital the diagnosis of bipolar became a label that explained two attempts at suicide. In this book, I try to describe from a fictional character the depression that I experienced. This book is a short story about a fictional character that is based on my life living with mental illness. 1 in 4 people will develop mental health problems in their lives and 1 in 6 people report experiencing mental illness. Many who develop mental illness are stigmatized by those around them. They lose friends and paid work. In this story, I write about overcoming the stigma and attempts at suicide. This book is temporarily unavailable.
Fascinating and terrifying, the Medusa story has long been a powerful signifier in culture with poets, feminists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, political theorists, artists, writers, and others. Bringing together the essential passages and commentary about Medusa, The Medusa Reader traces her through the ages, from classical times through the Renaissance to the pop culture, art, and fashion of today. This collection, with a critical introduction and striking illustrations, is the first major anthology of primary material and critical commentary on this most provocative and enigmatic of figures.
