You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In spite of being well into middle-age, Pac-Man's popularity shows no sign of decline and the character has appeared in over sixty games on virtually every games platform ever released. According to the David Brown celebrity index, in 2008, nearly three decades after initial release, 94% of Americans were able to recognise Pac-Man, which gave the character greater brand awareness than Super Mario. Pac-Man, with its avowed commitment to non-violence was a videogame of many firsts, including being designed to appeal to children and females and providing the first narrative interlude in a videogame. Although iconic, Pac-Man has not been subject to sustained critical analysis. This book helps to fill that gap, providing an extensive, sophisticated, but accessible analysis of the influence of Pac-Man on the way that we live in contemporary western societies.
A new vision of the good life as collective transformation against the fragmentation of contemporary life.
In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and L...
Exploring what can be learnt when literary critics in the field of animal studies temporarily direct attention away from representations of nonhuman animals in literature and towards liminal figures like androids, aliens and ghosts, this book examines the boundaries of humanness. Simultaneously, it encourages the reader both to see nonhuman animals afresh and to reimagine the terms of our relationships with them. Examining imaginative texts by writers such as Octavia Butler, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeanette Winterson and J. M. Coetzee, this book looks at depictions of androids that redefine traditional humanist qualities such as hope and uniqueness. It examines alien visions that unmask the racist and heteronormative roots of speciesism. And it unpacks examples of ghosts and spirits who offer posthumous visions of having-been-human that decenter anthropocentrism. In doing so, it leaves open the potential for better relationships and futures with nonhuman animals.
A compelling critique of contemporary continental theory. Through a series of incisive readings of leading theoretical figures of affirmationism--Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri and Alain Badiou--Benjamin Noys contests the tendency of recent theory to rely on affirmation, and especially an affirmative thinking of resistance. He reveals a profound current of negativity that allows theory to return to its political calling.
Science fiction might not be the first thing that springs to mind when we think of Irish literature. But in the post-war period in Belfast, two authors, Bob Shaw and James White, began producing science fiction stories, eventually selling them to international markets and gaining the respect of luminaries such as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss and Stanley Kubrick. Although lauded in the international science fiction scene for their innovations in the genre, Shaw and White’s work has been relatively ignored within Irish Studies. This book connects the emergence of science fiction in Belfast with the position of the city as the locus of technological development on the island of Ireland, and...
These 12 essays give you new perspectives on how Agamben's work is increasingly relevant to economy and political action: the two ideas that frame the most pressing problems of global politics. New analyses of Agamben's recent work on government and his relationship to the revolutionary tradition opening up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in the post-financial crisis world. Contributors: Daniel McLoughlin Giorgio Agamben Jason E. Smith Jessica Whyte Justin Clemens Mathew Abbott Miguel Vatter Nicholas Heron Sergei Prozorov Simone Bignall Steven DeCaroli
The concept of the avant garde is highly contested, whether one consigns it to history or claims it for present-day or future uses. The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on the kinds of radical art theory and partisan practices that are possible in today’s world of global art markets and creative industry entrepreneurialism. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis. The manifest strategies, temporalities, and genealogies of avant-garde art and politics are expressed through an international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary convocation of ideas that covers the fields of film, video, architecture, visual art, art activism, literature, poetry, theatre, performance, intermedia and music.
A concise guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated The Story of the Eye.