Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries

Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries
Author: Joseph Natoli
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1438463529

Uniting personal history with cultural history, Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries tells a story of a mind, a time, and a culture. The vehicle or medium of this excursion is an overview and sampling of the author's work, and what is revealed are cautionary tales of a once-aspiring egalitarian democracy confronted with plutocracy's gentrification; of analog history and off-line life superseded by a rush toward virtualized, robotic, AI transformation of the human life-world; of everything social and public giving way to everything personal and opinionated. The vagaries of a lifetime of paths taken are woven together by a narrative that reveals in every piece a significance that was only partially present at its initial writing. Thus, the reader becomes involved in a developing story of a certain personal psyche working toward understanding its own development within a changing American culture. Sometimes angry, sometimes joyful, but always curious and wry, Joseph Natoli crosses the boundary lines of psychology, politics, literature, philosophy, education, and economics to show how we bring ourselves and our cultural imaginaries simultaneously into being through the processes and pleasures of thinking beyond the confines of the personal.

'Voyage to the Moon' and Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America

'Voyage to the Moon' and Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America
Author: Paul C. Gutjahr
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2018-03-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1783087420

'Voyage to the Moon' And Other Imaginary Lunar Flights of Fancy in Antebellum America gathers for the first time in a scholarly critical edition four moon voyage stories published by Americans prior to the Civil War. Included in this volume are the works by George Tucker, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Adams Locke and John Leonard Riddell. Along with a general introduction to the collection as a whole, each story has its own introductory material along with explanatory footnotes and appendixes to help identify the key points of its textual and cultural history.

Reception of Northrop Frye

Reception of Northrop Frye
Author:
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 735
Release: 2021-09-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1487508204

The Reception of Northrup Frye takes a thorough accounting of the presence of Frye in existing works and argues against Frye's diminishing status as an important critical voice.

Play Among Books

Play Among Books
Author: Miro Roman
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2021-12-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3035624054

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? This question opens up an important research perspective. In this book, Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books. Focusing on the intersection of information technology and architectural formulation, the authors create an evolving intellectual reflection on digital architecture and computer science.

The Dark Fantastic

The Dark Fantastic
Author: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2020-09-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1479806072

Reveals the diversity crisis in children's and young adult media as not only a lack of representation, but a lack of imagination Stories provide portals into other worlds, both real and imagined. The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

The Imaginary Voyages

The Imaginary Voyages
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher: Macmillan Reference USA
Total Pages: 724
Release: 1981
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

The first volume of a new edition of Poe, this includes three of Poe's longest prose works, three related by reason of journey motifs underlying their structures.