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The novel is no longer the youngest medium, but today has been
displaced by the graphic novel, an even younger medium. Whereas the
novel had been concerned with the various utopian projects of
Modernity, the graphic novel operates inside a world horizon of mad
scientists, failed superheroes and crumbling cities. Indeed, it
takes for granted the failure of all modernizing utopias, while
simultaneously retrieving two-dimensional Giant Humans from the
world of the ancient epics with which to construct personal immune
systems for the Self, especially since public immune systems no
longer function properly. In this book, John David Ebert discusses
24 of the most popular graphic novels of all time, including "The
Dark Knight Returns," "Watchmen," "Black Hole," etc., looking for
traces of the new imaginary significations with which the youth of
today are shoring up the ruins of their own subjectivities.
Contemporary art is a very different kind of art from anything that
has ever been practiced in the past. It is an art that takes place
after the age of metaphysics, when all the imaginary significations
that once used to anchor art in traditional meaning systems have
disintegrated. Today's artist, consequently, is left with a rubble
heap of broken meaning systems, discarded signifiers and semiotic
vacancies that must be sifted through in a quest for new meanings
appropriate to an age that has been reshaped by globalization.
Through discussions of the works of artists such as Damien Hirst,
Anish Kapoor, Anselm Kiefer, Christian Boltanski and many others,
John David Ebert attempts to fathom the nature of what it means to
be an artist in a post-metaphysical age in which all certainties of
meaning have collapsed.
Disasters, both natural and man-made, are on the rise. Indeed, a
catastrophe of one sort or another seems always to be unfolding
somewhere on this planet. We have entered into a veritable Age of
Catastrophes which, in the 20th century, grew both larger and more
complex, to the point where disasters are now routinely planetary
in scale and scope. The old days of the geographically isolated
industrial accidents, of the sinking of a Titanic or the explosion
of a Hindenburg, together with their isolated causes and limited
effects, is over. Now, disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina,
the BP oil spill or the Japan tsunami and nuclear reactor accident,
threaten to engulf the very order of civilization. This book
analyzes the efforts of Westerners to keep the catastrophes
outside, while maintaining order on the inside of society. These
efforts are presently breaking down, as Nature and Civilization
have become so intertwined they can no longer be clearly separated.
Catastrophe is everywhere, and natural disasters, moreover, are
becoming increasingly more difficult to differentiate from
""man-made.
This in-depth series of literary portraits studies celebrities who
died in famous and tragic ways—ways that still resonate as
archetypal death scenarios in present day. We know their likes and
dislikes, admire their talents, envy them for daring to be what we
can't or what we won't. When they are snatched from us, we feel a
personal loss and an unwillingness to let go. And so we transform
these mere human beings into icons whose stars often shine in death
even more brilliantly than in life. Dead Celebrities, Living Icons:
Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar explores
this phenomenon through a series of essays on 14 men and women who
are, arguably, the most famous people of the 20th and early 21st
centuries. The book covers the epoch of the celebrity beginning in
the 1930s with Howard Hughes and Walt Disney and continues to the
present day with the life and death of Michael Jackson. Far more
than just a collection of biographies, Dead Celebrities, Living
Icons documents the philosophical importance and significance of
the contemporary cult of the celebrity and analyzes the tragic
consequences of a human life lived in the glare of the media
spotlight.
From the 15th century until the mid-1990s, media based on the
printed word--including books, magazines, newspapers, and
journals--dominated society. Today, however, an onslaught of
digital media centered on the Internet is developing at a
breathtaking pace, destabilizing the very idea of printed media and
fundamentally reshaping our world in the process. This study
explores how Internet entities like Amazon, YouTube, Facebook,
Wikipedia, and Google, and gadgets such as digital cameras, cell
phones, video games, robots, drones, and all things MacIntosh have
affected everything from the book industry and copyright law to how
we conduct social relationships and consider knowledge. Including a
chronology of significant events in the history of the digital
explosion, this investigation of the often overlooked "shadow" side
of new technology chronicles life during such a radical societal
shift and follows the process whereby one world disintegrates while
another takes its place.
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