The Spaces of Postmodernity

The Spaces of Postmodernity PDF

Author: Michael J. Dear

Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

Published: 2002-02-15

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 9780631217824

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"Documents the emergence and impact of postmodern thought in human geography. Intended as a companion volume to Michael Dear's The postmodern urban condition (Blackwell, 2000)."--Pref.

Postmodern Geographies

Postmodern Geographies PDF

Author: Edward W. Soja

Publisher: Verso

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780860919360

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Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the dialectics of space, time and social being. Soja charts the respatialization of social theory from the still unfolding encounter between Western Marxism and modern geography, through the current debates on the emergence of a postfordist regime of "flexible accumulation." The postmodern geography of Los Angeles, exposed in a provocative pair of essays, serves as a model in his account of the contemporary struggle for control over the social production of space.

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism

The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism PDF

Author: Steven Connor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-07-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521648400

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The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.

Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature

Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature PDF

Author: Patricia Garcia

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-04-24

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1317581326

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Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory

Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory PDF

Author: Michael Kane

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 3030374491

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Postmodern Time and Space in Fiction and Theory seeks to place the contemporary transformation of notions of space and time, often attributed to the technologies we use, in the context of the ongoing transformations of modernity. Bringing together examples of modern and contemporary fiction (from Defoe to DeLillo, Frankenstein to Finnegans Wake) and theoretical discussions of the modern and the post-modern, the author explores the legacy of modern transformations of space and time under five headings: “The Space of Nature”; “The Space of the City”; “Postmodern or Most Modern Time”; “The Time and Space of the Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction”; and “Travel: from Modernity to...?”. These five essays re-examine the meanings of modernity and its aftermath in relation to the spaces and times of the natural, the urban and the media environment.

Narrating Postmodern Time and Space

Narrating Postmodern Time and Space PDF

Author: Joseph Francese

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1997-01-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780791435137

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Although Morrison, Doctorow, and Tabucchi vary in their stylisitic responses to these changes, their narratives propose a collective recovery of the past into a future-oriented present and serve as examples of how literature can intervene in history, rather than merely reflecting and acquiescing to it.

Fire and Power

Fire and Power PDF

Author: William D. Atwill

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0820337730

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In Fire and Power William D. Atwill maps the cultural contours of space-age America through readings of some of the era's most popular and influential narratives: Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, John Updike's Rabbit Redux, Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon, Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Don DeLillo's Ratner's Star. Together, Atwill demonstrates, these key texts comprise a literary history of the space age, an exploration of the novel's possibilities in uncertain times, and a disturbing critique of postwar society. The massive technological enterprise known as the Manned Space Program was, in Atwill's words, “the historical marker of our age,” and in our race to the moon, he says, Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Wolfe, Pynchon, and DeLillo found a trope for the postmodern condition. To these writers, the space program was the most visible and outward sign of a radical shift in the culture that fostered it—a shift from modernism's search for interior, individual unity amidst chaos to the postmodern perception of the individual's fragmentation and uncertain standing in the world.

Space and Social Theory

Space and Social Theory PDF

Author: Georges Benko

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1997-07-07

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9780631194675

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In this book, the world's leading spacial theorists provide new accounts of the central questions and issues in social-spacial theory with critical perspectives on the post-modern condition.

Los Angeles as Postmodern Space

Los Angeles as Postmodern Space PDF

Author: Markus Widmer

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2008-11

Total Pages: 29

ISBN-13: 3640202724

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Essay from the year 1998 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1 (A), University of Aberdeen (English Department), course: Read the City - Read the Text, 11 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Edward W. Soja called Los Angeles 'the quintessential postmodern metropolis'. This, however, shall not be the premise of my argument in this essay, because of the obvious danger of circularity. Yet I will use postmodern critics and compare my findings to postmodern models of culture, space and society. I will not discuss the term postmodernism itself, simply because the range of this essay does not allow my entering this ongoing debate. The term will be used as denoting both a period, beginning, for my purposes, in the 1960s, and a theory of cultural tendencies in contemporary life. For this essay, I will assume that postmodernism is a fact, a part of everyday reality, and that it differs substantially from modernism. The main body of this essay will consist of a discussion of the fundamental factors which define Los Angeles as postmodern space. I will focus on particularities that distinguish Los Angeles from other cities, most of all from those which have not yet crossed the threshold of postmodernity. Firstly, I will investigate the geographical instability of the city; the fact that it is threatened to be annihilated by natural forces such as earthquakes and the desert. Secondly, I will address the idea of the city as a desert, its horizontality, its vastness, its lack of centre. Thirdly, the structure on this flat surface will be addressed; the freeways as an arterial network, and the structure of segregating walls, both literal and metaphorical. Finally, I will conclude by investigating the parallels between the idea of instability that underlies all of the factors I discuss, and the notion of the unstable in postmodernism.