A massive underground sensation, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the internet age. In this book, 21 fans and scholars address the film's influences—westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus—and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies contains neither arid analyses nor lectures for the late-night crowd, but new ways of thinking and writ...

How do we integrate the theoretical underpinnings of Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) into our understanding of the social harms inflicted upon us? How can we use it to inform our struggles and affect societal change under capitalism?Integrating our understanding of productive and reproductive spheres and exploring the connection between identity-based oppression and class exploitation, SRT has emerged as a powerful Marxist frame for social analysis and political practice. In this ...

"Playful and (un)deadly serious . . . chew[s] through a near-exhaustive array of films, television, literature, culture, music and even cocktails."— Times Literary SupplementThey have stalked the horizons of our culture, wreaked havoc on moribund concepts of dead and not dead, threatened our sense of identity, and endangered our personal safety. Now zombies have emerged from the lurking shadows of society's fringes to wander the sacred halls of the academy...

"By playing with notions of collecting and cataloging, this anthology offers a range of investigations into detritus and forgotten ephemera."—Colin Dickey, coeditor of The Morbid Anatomy AnthologyThe modern age is no stranger to the cabinet of curiosities, the freak show, or a drawer full of odds and ends. These collections of oddities engagingly work against the rationality and order of the conventional archive found in a university, a ...

Judge Aaron Jaffe: Reforming Illinois is an oral history of Aaron Jaffes legislative, judicial, and executive branch careers. It is also a story of how the author met Judge Jaffe and gained wisdom from a master politician operating in one of America's most notorious political battlegrounds. As legislator, Jaffe changed rape laws to reflect victims' perspectives. Though white, he was recruited to the Black Caucus because of a better voting record than other legislators, black or white. As j...

The first English-language translation of Vilém Flusser’s final series of lectures: the definitive introduction to his methods and ideas in new media theoryIn summer 1991, shortly before his death, Vilém Flusser gave a series of lectures as guest professor at Ruhr University Bochum at the invitation of Friedrich Kittler. Flusser intended for these lectures to be the definitive introduction to his “communicology,” the study of human communication and the means by wh...

The Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920–1991) has been recognized as a decisive past master in the emergence of contemporary media theory and media archeology. His work engages and also rethinks several mythologies of modernity, devising new methodologies, experimental literary practices, and expanded hermeneutics that trouble traditional practices of literary/literate knowledge, shared experience, reception, and communication.Working within an expanded concept of moder...

A massive underground sensation, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the internet age. In this book, 21 fans and scholars address the film's influences—westerns, noir, grail legends, the 1960s, and Fluxus—and its historical connections to the first Iraq war, boomers, slackerdom, surrealism, college culture, and of course bowling. The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies contains neither arid analyses nor lectures for the late-night crowd, but new ways of thinking and writ...

All of this information at our fingertips—and we might not need any of itConcurrent with the compulsory connectivity of the digital age is the rise of the spoiler. The inevitability of information has changed the critical quality of modernity, leaving us with acute vertigo—a feeling that nothing new is left out there. Encompassing memes and trigger warnings, Vilem Flusser and Thomas Pynchon, Spoiler Alert wrangles with the state of surprise in post-histori...

When people look back at the 2016 Election, they will use many words to describe it. Among them will not be “decorous,” “thoughtful,” “reasoned,” and “civil.”The campaign, at times, has seemed as if it was waged in an alternate cartoon universe.It’s hard to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or Abraham Lincoln boasting in a public forum about the size of their genitals. We have had a candidate being labeled “Lucifer in the Flesh” and the love child of Joe McCarthy and Dracula. And an ...

Buffed up to a metallic shine; loose fitting, lopsided, or kludgy; getting in the way or getting lost; collapsing in an explosion of dust caught on the warehouse CCTV. Modern things are going their own ways, and this book attempts to follow them. A course of thought about their comings and goings and cascading side effects, The Way Things Go offers a thesis demonstrated via a century-long countdown of stuff. Modernist critical theory and aesthetic method, it argues, are bound up w...

Bringing together Canadian, American, and British scholars, this volume explores the relationship between modernism and modern celebrity culture. In support of the collection's overriding thesis that modern celebrity and modernism are mutually determining phenomena, the contributors take on a range of transatlantic canonical and noncanonical figures, from the expected (Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the surprising (Elvis and Hitler). Illuminating case studies are balanced by th...