What comes after the death of literature? Kojin Karatani, winner of the 2022 Berggruen Prize, examines the corpse, investigates the cause of death, and offers glimpses of an afterlife from various theoretical perspectives. The End of Modern Literature reimagines the significance and concept of literature.Alongside Karatani's essential essay comes commentary and responses by Fredric Jameson, Bruce Robbins, Kenneth W. Warren, Gauri Viswanathan, Andrew Gibson, Young-il Cho, Y...

Unlocking a vital understanding of how literary studies and media studies overlap and are bound togetherA synthetic history of new media reception in modern and contemporary Japan, The New Real positions mimesis at the heart of the media concept. Considering both mimicry and representation as the core functions of mediation and remediation, Jonathan E. Abel offers a new model for media studies while explaining the deep and ongoing imbrication of Japan in t...

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age”—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and concepts of information are usually considered the provenance of the natural and social sciences, which present them as politically and philosophically neutral. Yet the humanities should and do play an important role in interpreting and cri...

For decades, we have been told we live in the “information age”—a time when disruptive technological advancement has reshaped the categories and social uses of knowledge and when quantitative assessment is increasingly privileged. Such methodologies and concepts of information are usually considered the provenance of the natural and social sciences, which present them as politically and philosophically neutral. Yet the humanities should and do play an important role in interpreting and cri...

In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the cha...

The unexpected gift of a favored bottle of shiraz from her husband leads to the adventure of a lifetime for Karen Pond and her family—moving from rural Maine to the largest city in the world: Tokyo, Japan.Getting Genki in Japan is a collection of illustrated travel and culture essays and musings of a Down East Mom's absurd and exhilarating adventures in the Far East. From bewildered and befuddled (and back again) to (somewhat) wise, these narratives recount a journey of cu...

When the alien Mimics invade, Keiji Kiriya is just one of many recruits shoved into a suit of battle armor called a Jacket and sent out to kill. Keiji dies on the battlefield, only to be reborn each morning to fight and die again and again. On his 158th iteration, he gets a message from a mysterious ally--the female soldier known as the Full Metal Bitch. Is she the key to Keiji's escape or his final death?Now a major motion picture starring Tom Cruise!

A fresh take on the dopplegänger and its place in Japanese film and literature—past and presentSince its earliest known use in German Romanticism in the late 1700s, the word Doppelgänger (double-walker) can be found throughout a vast array of literature, culture, and media. This motif of doubling can also be seen traversing historical and cultural boundaries. Double Visions, Double Fictions analyzes the myriad manifestations of the doppelgänger in...

An account of the complex relationship between technology and romanticism that links nineteenth-century monsters, automata, and mesmerism with twenty-first-century technology's magic devices and romantic cyborgs.Romanticism and technology are widely assumed to be opposed to each other. Romanticism—understood as a reaction against rationalism and objectivity—is perhaps the last thing users and developers of information and communication technology (ICT) think about ...

All the political systems of the modern age have been the products of three distinct ideologies: the first, and oldest, is liberal democracy; the second is Marxism; and the third is fascism. The latter two have long since failed and passed out of the pages of history, and the first no longer operates as an ideology, but rather as something taken for granted.The world today finds itself on the brink of a post-political reality — one in which the values of liberalism are so deeply em...

Graphic Design Theory is organized in three sections: "Creating the Field" traces the evolution of graphic design over the course of the early 1900s, including influential avant-garde ideas of futurism, constructivism, and the Bauhaus; "Building on Success" covers the mid- to late twentieth century and considers the International Style, modernism, and postmodernism; and "Mapping the Future" opens at the end of the last century and includes current discussions on legibility, social...

There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Zizek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal....