Archive for May 2013

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[ecrea] Monster Culture Book Announcement

Thu May 30 01:03:11 GMT 2013



Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader
Marina Levina, PhD and Diem-my Bui, PhD (Editors)

Bloomsbury Academic/Continuum Press (May, 2013)

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/monster-culture-in-the-21st-century-9781441178398/

http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Culture-21st-Century-ebook/dp/B00CPOS4X4/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1369848814&sr=1-1
About Monster Culture in the 21st Century

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.
Table Of Contents

Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century by Marina Levina and Diem My Bui
1. Ontology and Monstrosity by Amit S. Rai

Part I: Monstrous Identities
2. Heading Towards the Past: The Twilight Vampire Figure as Surveillance Metaphor by Florian Grandena
3. Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times by Susana Loza
4. Battling Monsters and Becoming Monstrous: Human Devolution in The Walking Deadby Kyle W. Bishop 5. The Monster in the Mirror: Reflecting and Deflecting the Mobility of Gendered Violence Onscreen by Megan Foley 6. Intersectionality Bites: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in HBO’s True Blood by Peter Campbell 7. Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts by Rosalind Sibielski

Part II: Monstrous Technologies
8. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics and Zombies by Sherryl Vint 9. Monstrous Technologies and the Telepathology of Everyday Life by Jeremy Biles 10. Monstrous Citizenships: Coercion, Submission, and the Possibilities of Resistance inNever Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas by Roy Osamu Kamada 11. On the Frontlines of the Zombie War in the Congo: Digital Technology, the Trade in Conflict Minerals, and Zombification by Jeffrey W. Mantz 12. Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games by Jaroslav Švelch 13. Killing Whiteness:The Critical Positioning of Zombie Walk Brides in Internet Settings by Michele White

Part III: Monstrous Territories
14. Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary by Michael S. Drake 15. The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror by Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo 16. The Heartland Under Siege: Undead in the West by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper 17. When Matter Becomes an Active Agent: The Incorporeal Monstrosity of Threat in Lostby Enrica Picarelli 18. Monstrous Capital: Frankenstein Derivatives, Financial Wizards, and the Spectral Economy by Ryan Gillespie
19. Domesticating the Monstrous in the Globalizing World by Carolyn Harford
About the Contributors
Index
Reviews

“Preoccupied with zombies, vampires, and ever more unholy configurations of human body parts and consciousnesses, the 21st century is proving to be a monstrous time.Monster Culture in the 21st Century offers readers an international and interdisciplinary theoretical toolkit that can help us better understand the monstrous’ magical ability to reflect and refract immense political, technoscientific, and ecological changes and anxieties.” – Carol A. Stabile, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Oregon, US,

“Monster Culture in the 21st Century brings together various theoretical and methodological approaches to look critically at the trope of the monstrous as an increasingly ubiquitous mode for managing contemporary crises of identity, technology and globalization through popular media culture. As such it provides refreshing new directions for understanding ‘monster culture’ beyond metaphor and as a necessary condition of our lives in the 21st century.” – Dr. Jane Chi Hyun Park, Senior Lecturer, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, Australia
Marina Levina, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
University of Memphis
212 Art and Communication Bldg
Memphis, TN 38152
Office: 901-678-2577
Fax: 901-678-4331
(mlevina /at/ memphis.edu)
http://www.marinalevina.com/

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