Genres of Privacy in Postwar America

Genres of Privacy in Postwar America

Author: Palmer Rampell

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 1503631907

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

With this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court's ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia. Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.


Book Synopsis Genres of Privacy in Postwar America by : Palmer Rampell

Download or read book Genres of Privacy in Postwar America written by Palmer Rampell and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this incisive work, Palmer Rampell reveals the surprising role genre fiction played in redefining the category of the private person in the postwar period. Especially after the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to privacy in 1965, legal scholars, judges, and the public scrambled to understand the scope of that right. Before and after the Court's ruling, authors of genre fiction and film reformulated their aliens, androids, and monsters to engage in debates about personal privacy as it pertained to issues like abortion, police surveillance, and euthanasia. Triangulating novels and films with original archival discoveries and historical and legal research, Rampell provides new readings of Patricia Highsmith, Dorothy B. Hughes, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, and others. The book pairs the right of privacy for heterosexual sex with queer and proto-feminist crime fiction; racialized police surveillance at midcentury with Black crime fiction; Roe v. Wade (1973) with 1960s and 1970s science fiction; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (1974) with horror; and the right to die with westerns. While we are accustomed to defenses of fiction for its capacity to represent fully rendered private life, Rampell suggests that we might value a certain strand of genre fiction for its capacity to theorize the meaning of the protean concept of privacy.


The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

The Origins of Cool in Postwar America

Author: Joel Dinerstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-09-26

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 022659906X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.


Book Synopsis The Origins of Cool in Postwar America by : Joel Dinerstein

Download or read book The Origins of Cool in Postwar America written by Joel Dinerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.


Paraliterary

Paraliterary

Author: Merve Emre

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-11-14

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 022647402X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.


Book Synopsis Paraliterary by : Merve Emre

Download or read book Paraliterary written by Merve Emre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.


American Graphic

American Graphic

Author: Rebecca B. Clark

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1503634248

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world.


Book Synopsis American Graphic by : Rebecca B. Clark

Download or read book American Graphic written by Rebecca B. Clark and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world.


The Residential Is Racial

The Residential Is Racial

Author: Adrienne Brown

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 1503638650

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race. In The Residential is Racial Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership's necessity to white survival through to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Reading real estate archives and appraisal textbooks alongside literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon, Brown goes beyond merely identifying the discriminatory mechanisms that the real estate industry used to forestall black homeownership. Rather, she reveals that redlining and other forms of racial discrimination are perceptual modes, changing what it meant to sense race and assign it value. Resituating residential discrimination as a key moment within the history of perception and aesthetics as well as of policy, demography, and democracy, we get an even more expansive picture of both its origins and its impacts. This book discovers that the racial honing of perception on the block—seeing race like a bureaucrat, an appraiser, and a homeowner—has become central to the functioning of the residential itself.


Book Synopsis The Residential Is Racial by : Adrienne Brown

Download or read book The Residential Is Racial written by Adrienne Brown and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-26 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housing experts and activists have long described the foundational role race has played in the creation of mass homeownership. This book insistently tracks the inverse: the role of mass homeownership in changing the definition, perception, and value of race. In The Residential is Racial Adrienne Brown reveals how mass homeownership remade the rubrics of race, from the early cases realtors made for homeownership's necessity to white survival through to the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Reading real estate archives and appraisal textbooks alongside literary works by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Thomas Pynchon, Brown goes beyond merely identifying the discriminatory mechanisms that the real estate industry used to forestall black homeownership. Rather, she reveals that redlining and other forms of racial discrimination are perceptual modes, changing what it meant to sense race and assign it value. Resituating residential discrimination as a key moment within the history of perception and aesthetics as well as of policy, demography, and democracy, we get an even more expansive picture of both its origins and its impacts. This book discovers that the racial honing of perception on the block—seeing race like a bureaucrat, an appraiser, and a homeowner—has become central to the functioning of the residential itself.


Environmental Justice in Postwar America

Environmental Justice in Postwar America

Author: Christopher W. Wells

Publisher: Weyerhaeuser Environmental Cla

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780295743684

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence--but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America's environmental burdens. This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as "environmental" issues. Environmental Justice in Postwar America is a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice. For more information, visit the editor's website: http: //cwwells.net/PostwarEJ


Book Synopsis Environmental Justice in Postwar America by : Christopher W. Wells

Download or read book Environmental Justice in Postwar America written by Christopher W. Wells and published by Weyerhaeuser Environmental Cla. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence--but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America's environmental burdens. This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as "environmental" issues. Environmental Justice in Postwar America is a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice. For more information, visit the editor's website: http: //cwwells.net/PostwarEJ


Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America

Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America

Author: Ewa Kołodziejczyk

Publisher: De Gruyter Open

Published: 2021-08-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9788395669637

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Czesław Miłosz is at times called an American poet. This means one thing in Poland, and something else in the United States. To Polish readers, this description is mainly related to the moment of his departure from Europe to take up employment at the University of California in Berkeley, and his settlement for many years in California, where his new poems and essays were written. Miłosz is to them an American poet, in a biographical sense, from the time he started living at Grizzly Peak until his return to Krakow, and in a symbolic sense, for as long as he cooperated with the publishing market, participated in literary life, and was an ambassador of Polish literature across the ocean. He is an American poet to the extent that his work was influenced by the thought and work of those cultural circles. However, one has to return to the landmark year of 1960, when Miłosz had only set off for Berkeley, and ask about the awareness with which he discovered America, where he spent those consequential five years fifteen years before, and where he apparently took refuge from the consequences of the Sovietization of his native part of Europe. He returned to America as someone familiar with its realities and its lifestyle, with the reasoning and actions of its people, aware of many local customs and problems, well versed in various circulations of culture and information, fluent in English, with a rich and current knowledge of the literature of the linguistic circles that permeated it. Little is known about the postwar period, when Miłosz built this extensive awareness. For various reasons, it has not been the subject of investigations and research. Not only because the question of the poet's American traits, posed ever more eagerly today, hides the assumption that it refers to his California period treated as a phase of life and creativity which is closed both temporally and intellectually. Such a formulation of this question also results partly from the Polish understanding of the label of an American poet. However, this question gains its full meaning only when its scope includes, firstly, the realization that 1960 was not the initial year in Miłosz's learning about America - it only marked a renewal of this process in a more complex way. Secondly, the question should include our awareness of the baggage of Miłosz's experiences accumulated in the 1940s, with which he reentered the New World. In other words, understanding the process of taking root in California after 1960 is possible when we, as Miłosz himself did, take into account his American postwar period, thought-out, problematized and reassessed in Europe after 1950. This book aims to show how Czesław Miłosz assimilated America from 1945 to 1950, how he expanded his cultural horizon there, incorporating various components within it. The subject of my interest has been, on the one hand, the sphere of his activities in many areas at the time, and on the other, the ways of making use of the intellectual opportunities that his stay in America created for him. The book consists of four parts, each dedicated to a different aspect of Miłosz's five years in America and based on archival research. The first part is a biographical reconstruction of his diplomatic and literary activities, the second discusses his lectures, articles and opinion journalism, the third recreates the process of his study of English-language literature, and the fourth examines the ways in which he assessed the postwar experience in his poetry, essays, and correspondence. While the last part concerns the period when Miłosz, residing in France, looks back on the American years, which to a large extent influenced the new way of interpreting them, the three previous ones concern the common five-year period and constitute a mutual reference system.


Book Synopsis Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America by : Ewa Kołodziejczyk

Download or read book Czesław Miłosz in Postwar America written by Ewa Kołodziejczyk and published by De Gruyter Open. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Czesław Miłosz is at times called an American poet. This means one thing in Poland, and something else in the United States. To Polish readers, this description is mainly related to the moment of his departure from Europe to take up employment at the University of California in Berkeley, and his settlement for many years in California, where his new poems and essays were written. Miłosz is to them an American poet, in a biographical sense, from the time he started living at Grizzly Peak until his return to Krakow, and in a symbolic sense, for as long as he cooperated with the publishing market, participated in literary life, and was an ambassador of Polish literature across the ocean. He is an American poet to the extent that his work was influenced by the thought and work of those cultural circles. However, one has to return to the landmark year of 1960, when Miłosz had only set off for Berkeley, and ask about the awareness with which he discovered America, where he spent those consequential five years fifteen years before, and where he apparently took refuge from the consequences of the Sovietization of his native part of Europe. He returned to America as someone familiar with its realities and its lifestyle, with the reasoning and actions of its people, aware of many local customs and problems, well versed in various circulations of culture and information, fluent in English, with a rich and current knowledge of the literature of the linguistic circles that permeated it. Little is known about the postwar period, when Miłosz built this extensive awareness. For various reasons, it has not been the subject of investigations and research. Not only because the question of the poet's American traits, posed ever more eagerly today, hides the assumption that it refers to his California period treated as a phase of life and creativity which is closed both temporally and intellectually. Such a formulation of this question also results partly from the Polish understanding of the label of an American poet. However, this question gains its full meaning only when its scope includes, firstly, the realization that 1960 was not the initial year in Miłosz's learning about America - it only marked a renewal of this process in a more complex way. Secondly, the question should include our awareness of the baggage of Miłosz's experiences accumulated in the 1940s, with which he reentered the New World. In other words, understanding the process of taking root in California after 1960 is possible when we, as Miłosz himself did, take into account his American postwar period, thought-out, problematized and reassessed in Europe after 1950. This book aims to show how Czesław Miłosz assimilated America from 1945 to 1950, how he expanded his cultural horizon there, incorporating various components within it. The subject of my interest has been, on the one hand, the sphere of his activities in many areas at the time, and on the other, the ways of making use of the intellectual opportunities that his stay in America created for him. The book consists of four parts, each dedicated to a different aspect of Miłosz's five years in America and based on archival research. The first part is a biographical reconstruction of his diplomatic and literary activities, the second discusses his lectures, articles and opinion journalism, the third recreates the process of his study of English-language literature, and the fourth examines the ways in which he assessed the postwar experience in his poetry, essays, and correspondence. While the last part concerns the period when Miłosz, residing in France, looks back on the American years, which to a large extent influenced the new way of interpreting them, the three previous ones concern the common five-year period and constitute a mutual reference system.


A Nation of Neighborhoods

A Nation of Neighborhoods

Author: Benjamin Looker

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-10-22

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 022629031X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Benjamin Looker investigates the cultural, social, and economic complexities of the idea of “neighborhood” in postwar America. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. Looker examines radically different neighborhood visions—by urban artists, critics, writers, and activists—to show how sociological debates over what neighborhood values resonated in art, political discourse, and popular culture. The neighborhood-—both the epitome of urban life and, in its insularity, an escape from it—was where twentieth-century urban Americans worked out solutions to tensions between atomization or overcrowding, harsh segregation or stifling statism, ethnic assimilation or cultural fragmentation.


Book Synopsis A Nation of Neighborhoods by : Benjamin Looker

Download or read book A Nation of Neighborhoods written by Benjamin Looker and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Benjamin Looker investigates the cultural, social, and economic complexities of the idea of “neighborhood” in postwar America. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the city neighborhood's significance and purpose became proxies for broader debates over the meaning and limits of American democracy. Looker examines radically different neighborhood visions—by urban artists, critics, writers, and activists—to show how sociological debates over what neighborhood values resonated in art, political discourse, and popular culture. The neighborhood-—both the epitome of urban life and, in its insularity, an escape from it—was where twentieth-century urban Americans worked out solutions to tensions between atomization or overcrowding, harsh segregation or stifling statism, ethnic assimilation or cultural fragmentation.


Writing Our Extinction

Writing Our Extinction

Author: Patrick Whitmarsh

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1503635554

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.


Book Synopsis Writing Our Extinction by : Patrick Whitmarsh

Download or read book Writing Our Extinction written by Patrick Whitmarsh and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.


Hollywood Quarterly

Hollywood Quarterly

Author: Eric Smoodin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-05-17

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 0520936329

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first issue of Hollywood Quarterly, in October 1945, marked the appearance of the most significant, successful, and regularly published journal of its kind in the United States. For its entire life, the Quarterly held to the leftist utopianism of its founders, several of whom would later be blacklisted. The journal attracted a collection of writers unmatched in North American film studies for the heterogeneity of their intellectual and practical concerns: from film, radio, and television industry workers to academics; from Sam Goldwyn, Edith Head, and Chuck Jones to Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. For this volume, Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin have selected essays that reflect the astonishing eclecticism of the journal, with sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films. They have also included articles on radio and television, reflecting the contents of just about every issue of the journal and exemplifying the extraordinary moment in film and media studies that Hollywood Quarterly captured and helped to create. In 1951, Hollywood Quarterly was renamed the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, and in 1958 it was replaced by Film Quarterly, which is still published by the University of California Press. During those first twelve years, the Quarterly maintained an intelligent, sophisticated, and critical interest in all the major entertainment media, not just film, and in issue after issue insisted on the importance of both aesthetic and sociological methodologies for studying popular culture, and on the political significance of the mass media.


Book Synopsis Hollywood Quarterly by : Eric Smoodin

Download or read book Hollywood Quarterly written by Eric Smoodin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-05-17 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first issue of Hollywood Quarterly, in October 1945, marked the appearance of the most significant, successful, and regularly published journal of its kind in the United States. For its entire life, the Quarterly held to the leftist utopianism of its founders, several of whom would later be blacklisted. The journal attracted a collection of writers unmatched in North American film studies for the heterogeneity of their intellectual and practical concerns: from film, radio, and television industry workers to academics; from Sam Goldwyn, Edith Head, and Chuck Jones to Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer. For this volume, Eric Smoodin and Ann Martin have selected essays that reflect the astonishing eclecticism of the journal, with sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films. They have also included articles on radio and television, reflecting the contents of just about every issue of the journal and exemplifying the extraordinary moment in film and media studies that Hollywood Quarterly captured and helped to create. In 1951, Hollywood Quarterly was renamed the Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television, and in 1958 it was replaced by Film Quarterly, which is still published by the University of California Press. During those first twelve years, the Quarterly maintained an intelligent, sophisticated, and critical interest in all the major entertainment media, not just film, and in issue after issue insisted on the importance of both aesthetic and sociological methodologies for studying popular culture, and on the political significance of the mass media.