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Summary
Summary
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 100 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. Castillo and Egginton, 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.
Author Notes
David R. Castillo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.
William Egginton is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, USA.
Reviews 1
Choice Review
In Castillo and Egginton's Medialogies, modern ideologies of reality are reconstructed and dissected via media views of the real. The authors posit that "inflationary" media exist when "the scope of their representation of the world threatens the confines of their culture's prior notions of reality." Following the views of postmodern theorists that the media now represent a hyperreal world, one that is constructed/configured by media impressions of reality, the authors see the media as arbiters and editors of a world presented as a commodity to a public. They wed such perspectives to the growth of modernism, individualism, science's power to render things objectively, and the agency of artists to render the world subjectively. They chart the growth of narrative perspectives on reality from early modernism and the works of Cervantes where authors theatricalize their literary worlds. These constructions of commodity-spectacles arise out of early modernist ideas of economic and political freedoms. Extending into today's politics, politicians like Trump copy images of America's past to apply to America's future. Media participate in acts of transformative reality, a series of codes parsing the world for personal consumption, making the real world I-world. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Stuart Lenig, Columbia State Community College
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations | p. vii |
Acknowledgments | p. ix |
Introduction: Medialogies | p. 1 |
Part 1 Inflationary Media | |
1 Editing Reality | p. 9 |
2 A New Perspective | p. 17 |
3 Theatricality | p. 27 |
4 Commodity-Spectacles | p. 35 |
5 How to Turn Things into Copies, and Copies into Things | p. 43 |
Part 2 Fundamentals | |
6 Ineffable Me | p. 59 |
7 Foundations | p. 65 |
8 Freedom for Sale | p. 73 |
9 Crime Shows | p. 79 |
10 Political Theater | p. 91 |
11 Monumental Screens | p. 99 |
12 The New Fundamentals | p. 111 |
Part 3 Exclusions | |
13 Terrifying Vistas of Reality | p. 121 |
14 Dreamboat Vampires and Zombie Capitalists | p. 127 |
15 The Global Undead | p. 141 |
16 Dark Mirrors | p. 149 |
17 Apocalypse Then and Now | p. 155 |
Part 4 In Defense of Being | |
18 Minor Strategies | p. 165 |
19 Stranger than Fiction | p. 169 |
20 Truth and Lies in Life and Art | p. 177 |
21 Staging the Event | p. 187 |
22 The Architecture of Mourning | p. 197 |
23 Occupy and Resist | p. 201 |
24 Empire of Solitude | p. 207 |
Epilogue | p. 219 |
Notes | p. 226 |
Bibliography | p. 241 |
Index | p. 254 |