Bringing a lively and accessible style to a complex subject, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls explores the idea of the "posthuman" and the ways in which it is represented in popular culture. Toffoletti explores images of the posthuman body from goth-rocker Marilyn Manson's digitally manipulated self-portraits to the famous TDK "baby" adverts, and from the work of artist Patricia Piccinini to the curiously "plastic" form of the ubiquitous Barbie doll, controversially rescued here from her negative image. Drawing on the work of thinkers including Baudrillard, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls explores the nature of the human - and its ambiguous gender - in an age of biotechnologies and digital worlds.
This book explores thematic parallels between Max Weber's theory of the rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world, and the critiques of contemporary culture developed by Lyotard, Foucault and Baudrillard. It is suggested that these three theorists, associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism, respond to Weber's account of the rise, nature, and trajectory of modern culture by pursuing highly imaginative and coherent strategies of affirmation and re-enchantment. Examining the work of these three key thinkers in this way casts new light on Weber's sociology of rationalisation and his theory of the crisis of modernity.
This book is for learners of English as a foreign language, at any level from intermediate upwards, who need to know more about Britain. It is invaluable to students on British Studies courses and to those who are studying British culture as a part of a general English course.
To Hell with Culture contains thirteen essays on anarchism and literature, with a focus on twentieth-century fiction, and on writers who have been neglected because of their non-canonical or regional status.
The ways in which anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have made an impact in British 20th-century literature are explored in this collection of critical essays. This radical and thus far under-considered topic is up for review now that traditional paradigms of leftist and radical thought are under reexamination and the Marxist tradition is being seen as an imposition on a situation that was always more various and complex than typical descriptions have admitted. These essays investigate the theory that in the early 20th century there were several currents of anarchist thought, ranging from extreme radicalism to effective conservativism, and that a good deal of the thinking and writing that has been classed as Marxist is in fact more accurately described as anarchist.
Celebrated films by Francis Ford Coppola, Jane Campion, and Ang Lee; best-selling novels by A. S. Byatt and William Gibson; revivals of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll's Alice, and nostalgic photography; computer graphics and cyberpunk performances: contemporary culture, high and low, has fallen in love with the nineteenth century. Major critical thinkers have found in the period the origins of contemporary consumerism, sexual science, gay culture, and feminism. And postmodern theory, which once drove a wedge between contemporary interpretation and its historical objects, has lately displayed a new self-consciousness about its own appropriations of the past. This diverse collection of essays begins a long-overdue discussion of how postmodernism understands the Victorian as its historical predecessor.
