Libros

Winner of the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature from the Electronic Literature Organization There is electronic literature that consists of works, and the authors and communities and practices around such works. This is not a book about that electronic literature. It is not a book that charts histories or genres of this emerging field, not a book setting out methods of reading and understanding. The Internet Unconscious is a book on the poetics of net writing, or more precisely on the subject of writing the net. By 'writing the net', Sandy Baldwin proposes three ways of analysis: 1) an understanding of the net as a loosely linked collocation of inscriptions, of writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; 2) as a discursive field that codifies and organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of 'electronic literature'; and 3) as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers' body to the work of the net. The Internet Unconscious describes the poetics of the net's "becoming-literary," by employing concepts that are both technically-specific and poetically-charged, providing a coherent and persuasive theory. The incorporation and projection of sites and technical protocols produces an uncanny displacement of the writer's body onto diverse part objects, and in turn to an intense and real inhabitation of the net through writing. The fundamental poetic situation of net writing is the phenomenology of "as-if." Net writing involves construal of the world through the imaginary.

It has become something of a cliché within the field of narratology to assert the commercial, aesthetic, and sociocultural relevance of narrative representations, but the fact remains that narratives are everywhere. Whenever we read a novel or a comic, watch a film or an episode of our favorite television series, or play the latest video game, we are likely to engage with narrative media. Similarly, the intermedial adaptations and transmedial entertainment franchises that have become increasingly visible during the past few decades are, at their core, narrative forms. Since a significant part of contemporary mediaculture is defined by the narratives we tell each other via various media, media studies need a genuinely transmedial narratology.
Focusing on the intersubjective construction of storyworlds as well as on prototypical forms of narratorial and subjective representation, Transmedial Narratology and Contemporary Media Culture provides not only a method for the analysis of salient transmedial strategies of narrative representation in contemporary films, comics, and videogames but also a theoretical frame within which medium-specific approachesfrom literary and film narratology, from comics studies and game studies, and from various other strands of media and culturalstudies may be employed to further our understanding of narratives across media.

This new Handbook links the growing body of media and conflict research with the field of security studies.

The academic sub-field of media and conflict has developed and expanded greatly over the past two decades. Operating across an unusually diverse range of academic fields, including political science, communications, journalism and media studies, cultural studies, international relations, sociology and psychology, scholars have engaged with a wide variety of issues concerning media and violent conflict. In no particular order of importance, academics have studied the ways in which news media has both enabled and constrained governments pursuing war, the role of the media as a catalyst for attempts to respond to humanitarian crises, the ways in which actors involved in violent political struggle and terrorists have exploited communication tools to further their aims, the role of media as a facilitator of, and a threat to, both peace building and conflict prevention. Underpinning this diverse and eclectic body of research is the recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of security and conflict. While the intellectual diversity of this field is an undoubted strength, there is also a pressing need to begin a process of facilitating both the consolidation of existing knowledge and the sketching out of the parameters of sub-field that can provide a location for the array of academics working on media and conflict. This handbook takes the process forward by linking the body of conflict and media research with field of security studies

The handbook is arranged into five sections. The first section ‘Theory and Principles’ explores a range of key theoretical and conceptual issues including various interpretations of the relationship between security and media, normative issues arising as well as locating ‘media and security’ within a broad conceptualisation of media that includes new forms of communication technology and popular culture. The section, overall, will provide a detailed account of state of the art foundational issues relating to how scholars think about media and security and what is considered important to study, and why. The following sections, ‘Media and "Traditional War"’, ‘Media and Human Security’, ‘Media and Policymaking in the Security State’ and 'Media and New Issues in Security' are designed to reflect, in broad terms, the existing research foci of the security studies field.

For scholars of security studies, this handbook will provide a key point of reference for state of the art scholarship concerning the media-security nexus; for scholars of communication and media studies, the handbook will provide a comprehensive mapping of the media-conflict field.

We are living in a time of inflationary media. While technological change has periodically altered and advanced the ways humans process and transmit knowledge, for the last 110 years the media with which we produce, transmit, and record ideas have multiplied in kind, speed, and power. Saturation in media is provoking a crisis in how we perceive and understand reality. Media become inflationary when the scope of their representation of the world outgrows the confines of their culture's prior grasp of reality. We call the resulting concept of reality that emerges the culture's medialogy. Medialogies offers a highly innovative approach to the contemporary construction of reality in cultural, political, and economic domains. Egginton and Castillo, both luminary scholars, combine a very accessible style with profound theoretical analysis, relying not only on works of philosophy and political theory but also on novels, Hollywood films, and mass media phenomena. The book invites us to reconsider the way reality is constructed, and how truth, sovereignty, agency, and authority are understood from the everyday, philosophical, and political points of view. A powerful analysis of actuality, with its roots in early modernity, this work is crucial to understanding reality in the information age.