The Mother In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Author : Elissa Marder
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
ISBN 13 : 082324055X
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Elissa Marder and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.

Author : Pamela Caughie
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135650934
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written by Pamela Caughie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon

Author : Sonja Stojanovic
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1800854897
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Mind the Ghost written by Sonja Stojanovic and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Author : Eduardo Cadava
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262046040
Total Pages : 513 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Paper Graveyards written by Eduardo Cadava and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A generously illustrated training manual for reading images, discussing work by Félix Nadar, Roland Barthes, Fazal Sheikh, Susan Meiselas, and others. Paper Graveyards is neither a work of traditional art history nor one of literary criticism. It is not strictly a history of ideas either, notwithstanding its very obvious erudition. Rather, in drawing upon all of these methods and approaches—and with extraordinary attention to language and style—Cadava’s writing examines the spectacular explosion of images during the last twenty years as a prompt to discuss not simply specific images but the role and place of these images in our everyday life. Considering work by Félix Nadar, Roland Barthes, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Fazal Sheikh, Susan Meiselas, and others, Cadava delineates different modes of reading that, taking their point of departure from the conviction that the past, the present, and the future are always bound together, provide us with a training manual of sorts for understanding visual material in the twenty-first century. In the process, these generously illustrated essays actively expand our sense of literacy by reconstructing the networks of relations that inhabit the plural worlds of images, and create a critical genealogy of what we still call “an image,” even when, with every day that passes, we perhaps understand less and less what this might mean.

Author : Berit Åström
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3319490370
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Absent Mother in the Cultural Imagination written by Berit Åström and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.

Author : James Martell
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429575254
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal written by James Martell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

Author : Cecily Devereux
Publisher : Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN 13 : 1771125888
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance written by Cecily Devereux and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2023-04-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance situates the 1908 dance craze, which The New York Times called “Salomania,” as a crucial event and a turning point in the history of the modern business of erotic dance. Framing Salomania with reference to imperial ideologies of motherhood and race, it works toward better understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This study turns critical attention to cultures of maternity in the late 19th century, primarily with reference to the ways in which women are defined in relation to their genitals as patriarchal property and space and are valued according to reproduction as their primary labour. Erotic dance as it takes shape in the modern representation of Salome insists both that the mother is and is not visible in the body of the dancer, a contradiction this study characterizes as reproductive fetishism. Looking at a range of media, the study traces the modern figure of Salome through visual art, writing, early psychoanalysis and dance, from "hootchie kootch" to the performances dancer Maud Allan called “mimeo-dramatic” to mid-20th-century North American films such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Charles Lamont's Salome, Where She Danced to the 21st-century HBO series The Sopranos.

Author : Naomi Waltham-Smith
Publisher : Fordham University Press
ISBN 13 : 0823294889
Total Pages : 149 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shattering Biopolitics written by Naomi Waltham-Smith and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of “over-hearings” between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality’s subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound’s capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.

Author : Liz W. Faber
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452964130
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Computer's Voice written by Liz W. Faber and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-12-22 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deconstruction of gender through the voices of Siri, HAL 9000, and other computers that talk Although computer-based personal assistants like Siri are increasingly ubiquitous, few users stop to ask what it means that some assistants are gendered female, others male. Why is Star Trek’s computer coded as female, while HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is heard as male? By examining how gender is built into these devices, author Liz W. Faber explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Faber begins by considering talking spaceships like those in Star Trek, the film Dark Star, and the TV series Quark, revealing the ideologies that underlie space-age progress. She then moves on to an intrepid decade-by-decade investigation of computer voices, tracing the evolution from the masculine voices of the ’70s and ’80s to the feminine ones of the ’90s and ’00s. Faber ends her account in the present, with incisive looks at the film Her and Siri herself. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender. It makes important contributions to conversations around the gender gap and the increasing acceptance of transgender people.

Author : Alison Sharrock
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487532016
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy written by Alison Sharrock and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores motherhood in Greek and Roman literature, focusing on images of mothers and their relationships with their children across a variety of genres.