[PDF] Fear And Fantasy In A Global World eBook

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Publisher : BRILL
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 31,35 MB
Release : 2015-09-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9004306048

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At a time when the mass media insist on bombarding us with news about natural, political and economic disasters, words, ideas and images associated with such “crises” and “catastrophes” shape to a great extent collective memory and current imagination. Fear and Fantasy in a Global World seeks to stir the debate on the processes and meanings of, as well as on the relations between, fear and fantasy in the globalized world. Collective fears and fantasies are analysed from a number of cross-disciplinary perspectives, promoted by the epistemological underpinnings of comparative literature. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the 17 essays here gathered respond to and scrutinize key questions related to the imaginaries of fear and fantasy, as well as their relations to trauma, crisis, anxiety, and representations of both the conscious and the unconscious. Contributors: Alexandra Hills, Ana Filipa Prata, Brecht de Groote, Christin Grunert, Christopher Bollas, Daniela Di Pasquale, David Vichnar, Edith Beltrán, Gero Guttzeit, Hande Gurses, Harriet Hulme, James Rushing Daniel, João Pedro da Costa, Margarita García Candeira, Marija Sruk, Martijn Boven, and Ortwin de Graef.

Author : Eric Avila
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 50,4 MB
Release : 2006-04
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0520248112

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"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Author : Cait Coker
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 252 pages
File Size : 45,12 MB
Release : 2020-01-10
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1476637334

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The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.

Author : Jason T. Sharples
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 10,8 MB
Release : 2020-06-19
Category : History
ISBN : 0812297105

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A thought-provoking history of slaveholders' fear of the people they enslaved and its consequences From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection. Because enslavers in British North America and the Caribbean methodically terrorized slaves and anticipated just vengeance, colonial officials consolidated their regime around the dread of rebellion. As Sharples shows through a comprehensive data set, colonial officials launched investigations into dubious rumors of planned revolts twice as often as actual slave uprisings occurred. In most of these cases, magistrates believed they had discovered plans for insurrection, coordinated by a network of enslaved men, just in time to avert the uprising. Their crackdowns, known as conspiracy scares, could last for weeks and involve hundreds of suspects. They sometimes brought the execution or banishment of dozens of slaves at a time, and loss and heartbreak many times over. Mining archival records, Sharples shows how colonists from New York to Barbados tortured slaves to solicit confessions of baroque plots that were strikingly consistent across places and periods. Informants claimed that conspirators took direction from foreign agents; timed alleged rebellions for a holiday such as Easter; planned to set fires that would make it easier to ambush white people in the confusion; and coordinated the uprising with European or Native American invasion forces. Yet, as Sharples demonstrates, these scripted accounts rarely resembled what enslaved rebels actually did when they took up arms. Ultimately, he argues, conspiracy scares locked colonists and slaves into a cycle of terror that bound American society together through shared racial fear.

Author : Julie Sze
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 35,35 MB
Release : 2015-01-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0520262484

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"The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory--combined with an increasing worldwide desire for inexpensive toys, clothes, and food--are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs of this desire: toys drenched in lead paint, dangerous medicines, and tainted pet food. Examining sites in China, including the plan for a new eco-city called Dongtan on the island of Chongming, suburbanization projects, and the Shanghai World Expo, JulieSze interrogates Chinese, European, and American 'eco-desire' and the eco-technological fantasies that underlie contemporary development of global cities and mega-suburbs. In doing so, she challenges readers to rethink how cities must undergo alterationsto become true 'eco-cities.' Sze frames her analysis of these case studies in the context of the problems of global economic change and climate crisis, and she explores the flows, fears, and fantasies of Pacific Rim politics that shaped plans for Dongtan. She looks at the flow of pollution from Asia to the United States (ten billion pounds of airborne pollutants annually). Simultaneously, she considers the flow of financial and political capital for eco-city and ecological development between elite powerstructures in the UK and China, and charts how climate change discussions align with US fears of China's ascendancy and the related demise of the American Century. Ultimately, Fantasy Islands examines how fears and fantasies about China and historical and political power change the American imagination."--Provided by publisher.

Author : Philip Alcabes
Publisher : Public Affairs
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 21,38 MB
Release : 2010-04-13
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 1586488090

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Alcabes persuasively argues that people's anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question--or the actual risks of contagion--but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood. b&w illustration insert.

Author : Spencer R. Weart
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 371 pages
File Size : 33,38 MB
Release : 2012-03-19
Category : Science
ISBN : 0674068661

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After a tsunami destroyed the cooling system at Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, triggering a meltdown, protesters around the world challenged the use of nuclear power. Germany announced it would close its plants by 2022. Although the ills of fossil fuels are better understood than ever, the threat of climate change has never aroused the same visceral dread or swift action. Spencer Weart dissects this paradox, demonstrating that a powerful web of images surrounding nuclear energy holds us captive, allowing fear, rather than facts, to drive our thinking and public policy. Building on his classic, Nuclear Fear, Weart follows nuclear imagery from its origins in the symbolism of medieval alchemy to its appearance in film and fiction. Long before nuclear fission was discovered, fantasies of the destroyed planet, the transforming ray, and the white city of the future took root in the popular imagination. At the turn of the twentieth century when limited facts about radioactivity became known, they produced a blurred picture upon which scientists and the public projected their hopes and fears. These fears were magnified during the Cold War, when mushroom clouds no longer needed to be imagined; they appeared on the evening news. Weart examines nuclear anxiety in sources as diverse as Alain Resnais's film Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, and the television show The Simpsons. Recognizing how much we remain in thrall to these setpieces of the imagination, Weart hopes, will help us resist manipulation from both sides of the nuclear debate.

Author : Peter Higgins
Publisher : Orbit
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 47,84 MB
Release : 2013-03-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0316219703

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Investigator Vissarion Lom has been summoned to the capital in order to catch a terrorist -- and ordered to report directly to the head of the secret police. A totalitarian state, worn down by an endless war, must be seen to crush home-grown insurgents with an iron fist. But Lom discovers Mirgorod to be more corrupted than he imagined: a murky world of secret police and revolutionaries, cabaret clubs and doomed artists. Lom has been chosen because he is an outsider, not involved in the struggle for power within the party. And because of the sliver of angel stone implanted in his head.

Author : Stephanie Chong
Publisher : Harlequin
Page : 19 pages
File Size : 39,69 MB
Release : 2011-08-23
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 077831247X

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Fledging guardian angel and yoga teacher Serena St. Clair dares to enter Devil's Paradise nightclub on a mission—to retrieve the wayward Hollywood "It Boy" she's assigned to protect. But she's ambushed by the club's owner, arch demon Julian Ascher. The most powerful demonic entity in Los Angeles, Julian is handsome as sin, a master of temptation who loves nothing more than corrupting pleasure-seeking humans. He won't release the lost soul Serena is supposed to guard. Unless she accepts his dangerous wager… After the disastrous way his human life ended, Julian vowed that no woman would get the better of him again. Yet this sexy-sweet angel, smelling of fresh ocean air and happiness, triggers centuries-old feelings. Now, their high-stakes game of seduction, where angels fall from grace and where demons fear to tread, will lead them either to an eternity in hell…or a deliciously hot heaven.

Author : Michael McGuire
Publisher : Prometheus Books
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 12,65 MB
Release : 2013-09-10
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1616148306

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A new book about brain chemistry, neural systems, and the formation of beliefs from the scientist who brought to light serotonin's many crucial roles in human behavior. Beliefs: What are they? How have evolution and culture led to a brain that is seemingly committed to near endless belief creation? And once established, why are most beliefs so difficult to change? Believing offers answers to these questions from the perspective of a leading neuroscientist and expert in brain-behavior research. Combining personal anecdotes and the latest research, Dr. McGuire takes the novel approach of focusing on the central and critical role of brain systems and the ways in which they interact with the environment to create and maintain beliefs. This approach yields some surprising and counterintuitive conclusions: • The brain is designed for belief creation and acceptance. • It is biased in favor of its own beliefs and is highly insensitive to disconfirming evidence. • It prefers beliefs that are pleasurable and rewarding to those that are unfavorable. • Beliefs are "afterthoughts" of unperceived brain activities; they don't cause behavior. • Our consciousness has minimal influence on the neural systems that create beliefs. Based on these observations, McGuire concludes that for the foreseeable future people will continue to hold a multitude of beliefs, many of them intransigent.