Search results for ""author jacob blevins""

The presentation of technology as a response to human want or need is a defining aspect of Black Mirror, a series that centers the transhumanist conviction that ontological deficiency is a solvable problem. The articles in this collection continue Black Mirror's examination of the transhuman need for plentitude, addressing the convergence of fantasy, the posthuman, and the dramatization of fear. The contributors contend that Black Mirror reveals both the cracks of the posthuman self and the formation of anxiety within fantasy's empty, yet necessary, economy of desire.The strength of the series lies in its ability to disrupt the visibility of technology, no longer portraying it as a naturalized, unseen background, affecting our very being at the ontological level without many of us realizing it. This volume of essays argues that this negative lesson is Black Mirror's most successful approach. It examines how Black Mirror demonstrates the Janus-like structure of fantasy, as well as how it teaches, unteaches, and reteaches us about desire in a technological world.

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Using Mikhal Bakhtin's concept of dialogism as a theoretical starting point, this volume investigates the manifestations of competing 'voices' within the tradition of lyric poetry. The lyric subject's understanding of himself/herself - through the very act of speaking/writing - is irrevocably connected, on multiple levels, to the heard and unheard voices of others. No matter how 'private' the voice of the lyric speaker appears to be, nearly every utterance is formed from and then positioned between what others have said or will say.Included here are essays on the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern lyric. Some of the essays engage Bakhtin 'head-on'; others by focusing explicitly on the construction of the subject through multiple discursive dialogues, implicitly bring Bakhtin to bear. These essays engage multiple elements of dialogism, including the convergence of masculine and feminine voices, public and private discourse, intertextuality and the 'voices of the past', the dialogue between literature and art, and the always present dialogue between speaker(s) and reader(s).

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