[PDF] Atopias eBook

Author : Frédéric Neyrat
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 17,60 MB
Release : 2017-10-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0823277577

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This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside “atopia”: not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an “object-oriented ontology” would be able to formalize, nor the matter that “new materialisms” could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its “eccentricity.” Etymologically, to exist means “to be outside” and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being. It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy—a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy—can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

Author : Siobhan Carroll
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 299 pages
File Size : 37,60 MB
Release : 2015-01-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0812291859

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Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaces—what Siobhan Carroll calls "atopias"—existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. The eighteenth century conceived of these geographic outliers as the natural limits of imperial expansion, but scientific and naval advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to know and control them. This development preoccupied British authors, who were accustomed to seeing atopic regions as otherworldly marvels in fantastical tales. Spaces that an empire could not colonize were spaces that literature might claim, as literary representations of atopias came to reflect their authors' attitudes toward the growth of the British Empire as well as the part they saw literature playing in that expansion. Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations. Examining the poetry of Samuel T. Coleridge and George Gordon Byron and the prose of Sophia Lee, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, as well as newspaper accounts and voyage narratives, she traces the ways Romantic and Victorian writers reconceptualized atopias as threatening or, at times, vulnerable. These textual explorations of the earth's highest reaches and secret depths shed light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that linger in the twenty-first century.

Author : Robert Tally Jr.
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 393 pages
File Size : 33,38 MB
Release : 2017-01-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1317596943

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The "spatial turn" in literary studies is transforming the way we think of the field. The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space maps the key areas of spatiality within literary studies, offering a comprehensive overview but also pointing towards new and exciting directions of study. The interdisciplinary and global approach provides a thorough introduction and includes thirty-two essays on topics such as: Spatial theory and practice Critical methodologies Work sites Cities and the geography of urban experience Maps, territories, readings. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how a variety of romantic, realist, modernist, and postmodernist narratives represent the changing social spaces of their world, and of our own world system today.

Author : Frédéric Neyrat
Publisher :
Page : 97 pages
File Size : 29,32 MB
Release :
Category : PHILOSOPHY
ISBN : 9780823280605

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Atopias is a manifesto for a radical existentialism that restores the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside "atopia": not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an object-oriented ontology might formalize, nor the matter that new materialisms might identify. Atopia is what constitutes the eccentric existence of every being. Etymologically, to exist means "to be outside" and Atopias argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world without ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism no longer privileges human beings, as Sartre and Heidegger did, but considers existence a universal condition of every being. Now, when our denial of any outside is at its most damaging, is the moment for such a radical existentialism. Only an atopian philosophy-a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy-can rechannel our fear of the outside. Breaking the immanence in which we are trapped, Atopias opens new ways to consider human and animal subjectivity, language, politics, and metaphysics.

Author : Markku Lehtimäki
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 14,81 MB
Release : 2022-11-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 3031101499

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This book addresses the Arctic and the northern regions by exploring cold waters and northern seascapes. It focuses on cultural discourses and artistic representations concerning the human experience and imagination of how the Arctic Ocean has been explored and used. It aims to assess what is specific to the northern waters vis-à-vis other sea and water areas in the world. The contextual background is provided by the fundamental shift from terra-based thinking towards aqua-based thinking, including the histories of the northern waters and the innovative ocean studies of the last decades. This book will be of interest to readers in Arctic studies and Sea and Ocean studies (including those with interests in literature, history, cultural and film studies, anthropology and politics), Environmental History and Cultural studies as well as in Russian studies. The book has been assembled with a view towards upper-level undergraduate and post-graduate students and scholars and will also be appropriate for courses in the fields mentioned above. The book will be of interest to specialists working in and with Arctic environmental issues. There is a broad array of international academic networks, environmental, governance and cultural associations outside academia whose members may also find the book of interest.

Author : Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 185 pages
File Size : 26,66 MB
Release : 2023-12-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1501375873

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A history and examination of dystopia and angst in popular culture that speaks to our current climate of dread. At the dawn of the 20th century, a wide-ranging utopianism dominated popular and intellectual cultures throughout Europe and America. However, in the aftermathof the World Wars, with such canonical examples as Brave New World and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, dystopia emerged as a dominant genre, in literature and in social thought. The continuing presence and eventual dominance of dystopian themes in popular culture-e.g., dismal authoritarian future states, sinister global conspiracies, post-apocalyptic landscapes, a proliferation of horrific monsters, and end-of-the-world fantasies-have confirmed the degree to which the 21st is also a dystopian century. Drawing on literature as varied as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, and on TV and film such as The Walking Dead, Black Mirror, and The Last of Us, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores the landscape of angst created by the monstrous accumulation of dystopian material. The Fiction of Dread provides an innovative reading of contemporary culture and offers an alternative vision for critical theory and practice at a moment when, as has been famously observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Author : Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 43,2 MB
Release : 2018-11-09
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0253037697

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What is our place in the world, and how do we inhabit, understand, and represent this place to others? Topophrenia gathers essays by Robert Tally that explore the relationship between space, place, and mapping, on the one hand, and literary criticism, history, and theory on the other. The book provides an introduction to spatial literary studies, exploring in detail the theory and practice of geocriticism, literary cartography, and the spatial humanities more generally. The spatial anxiety of disorientation and the need to know one's location, even if only subconsciously, is a deeply felt and shared human experience. Building on Yi Fu Tuan's "topophilia" (or love of place), Tally instead considers the notion of "topophrenia" as a simultaneous sense of place-consciousness coupled with a feeling of disorder, anxiety, and "dis-ease." He argues that no effective geography could be complete without also incorporating an awareness of the lonely, loathsome, or frightening spaces that condition our understanding of that space. Tally considers the tension between the objective ordering of a space and the subjective ways in which narrative worlds are constructed. Narrative maps present a way of understanding that seems realistic but is completely figurative. So how can these maps be used to not only understand the real world but also to put up an alternative vision of what that world might otherwise be? From Tolkien to Cervantes, Borges to More, Topophrenia provides a clear and compelling explanation of how geocriticism, the spatial humanities, and literary cartography help us to narrate, represent, and understand our place in a constantly changing world.

Author : Stefanie Strebel
Publisher : Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 28,70 MB
Release : 2021-06-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3772057519

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The American suburb is a space dominated by architectural mass production, sprawl, as well as a monotonous aesthetic eclecticism, and many critics argue that it has developed from a postwar utopia into a disorienting environment with which it is difficult to identify. The typical suburb has come to display characteristics of an atopia, that is, a space without borders or even a non-place, a generic space of transience. Dealing with the representation of architecture and the built environment in suburban literature and film from the 1920s until present, this study demonstrates that in its fictional representations, too, suburbia has largely turned into a place of non-architecture. A lack of architectural ethos and an abundance of "Junkspace" define suburban narratives, causing an increasing sense of disorientation and entropy in fictional characters.

Author : Enn Ots
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 49,8 MB
Release : 2010-09-20
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1136901981

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Existentialism; Urbanism; Aporia; Deontic; Tabula Rasa; Hyperspace; Heterotopia; Metareality; Structuralism... What does it all mean? The unique language used in architectural theory – both in speech and writing – can appear daunting and confusing, particularly to new architectural students. Decoding Theoryspeak provides an accessible guide to the specialized language of contemporary design for the next generation of thinkers, architects and design leaders. It includes: definitions of over 200 terms clear cross-references illustrations throughout. It is an essential pocket-sized resource for students and practitioners alike.

Author : Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 24,7 MB
Release : 2023-07-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1000915395

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The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question "What if?" Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative fiction, from the starting point in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to contemporary works that engage with the vast ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, analyses demonstrate how Arctic discourses are supported or subverted and how new Arctics are added to the textual tradition. To illuminate wider lines of inquiry informing the way the world is envisioned, humanity’s place and function in it, and more-than-human entanglements, analyses focus on the function of the actual Arctic and how this function impacts and is impacted by speculative elements. With effects of climate change training the global eye on the Arctic, and as debates around future northern cultural, economic and environmental sustainability intensify, there is a need for a deepened understanding of the discourses that have constructed and are constructing the Arctic. A careful mapping and serious consideration of both past and contemporary speculative visions thus illuminate the role the Arctic has played and may come to play in a diverse set of practices and fields.