Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture PDF Download

Author: Ricarda Vidal
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781906165420
Category : Automobiles
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
Car crash culture is a symptom of the 20th century, the author argues in this book, revealing that our love of the car and technology is caused by the continuing influence of turn-of-the-century ideas: the futurist technological utopia and a romantic return to nature.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: M. Brottman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137093218
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

View

Book Description
A morbidly fascinating and articulate collection of essays, this book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the disturbing, frequently conspiratorial, speculations that arise whenever the car becomes the cause or the site of human death. Through analysis of fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile, as well as through personal memoir and forensic reports, cultural critics ponder our very human fascination with the car crash. Topics include the roles and experiences of passengers and bystanders, car crash conspiracy theories, the automobile as a site of murder, studies of car crash cinema, and psychological interpretations of the notion of the 'accident.' The book features original essays by such underground icons as Kenneth Anger and Adam Parfrey.

Author: Susan Dobscha
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317536193
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 353

View

Book Description
Death has never been more visible to consumers. From life insurance to burial plots to estate planning, we are constantly reminded of consumer choices to be made with our mortality in mind. Religious beliefs in the afterlife (or their absence) impact everyday consumption activities. Death in a Consumer Culture presents the broadest array of research on the topic of death and consumer behaviour across disciplinary boundaries. Organised into five sections covering: The Death Industry; Death Rituals; Death and Consumption; Death and the Body; and Alternate Endings, the book explores topics from celebrity death tourism, pet and online memorialization; family history research, to alternatives to traditional corpse disposal methods and patient-assisted suicide. Work from scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies sits alongside research in marketing and consumer culture. From eastern and western perspectives, spanning social groups and demographic categories, all explore the ubiquity of death as a physical, emotional, cultural, social, and cosmological inevitability. Offering a richly unique anthology on this challenging topic, this book will be of interest to researchers working at the intersections of consumer culture, marketing and mortality.

Author: Maria-José Blanco
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782384340
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

View

Book Description
The social and cultural changes of the last century have transformed death from an everyday fact to something hidden from view. Shifting between the practical and the theoretical, the professional and the intimate, the real and the fictitious, this collection of essays explores the continued power of death over our lives. It examines the idea and experience of death from an interdisciplinary perspective, including studies of changing burial customs throughout Europe; an account of a“dying party” in the Netherlands; examinations of the fascination with violent death in crime fiction and the phenomenon of serial killer art; analyses of death and bereavement in poetry, fiction, and autobiography; and a look at audience reactions to depictions of death on screen. By studying and considering how death is thought about in the contemporary era, we might restore the natural place it has in our lives.

Author: Pearce Lynne Pearce
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748690867
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

View

Book Description
Engages literary texts in order to theorise the distinctive cognitive and affective experiences of drivingWhat sorts of things do we think about when we're driving - or being driven - in a car? Drivetime seeks to answer this question by drawing upon a rich archive of British and American texts from 'the motoring century' (1900-2000), paying particular attention to the way in which the practice of driving shapes and structures our thinking. While recent sociological and psychological research has helped explain how drivers are able to think about 'other things' while performing such a complex task, little attention has, as yet, been paid to the form these cognitive and affective journeys take. Pearce uses her close readings of literary texts - ranging from early twentieth-century motoring periodicals, Modernist and inter-war fiction , American 'road-trip' classics , and autobiography - in order to model different types of 'driving-event' and, by extension, the car's use as a means of phenomenological encounter, escape from memory, meditation, problem-solving and daydreaming.Key FeaturesBrings Humanities-based perspectives to bear upon topical debates in automobilities research Introduces a new concept for understanding our journeys made my car by focusing on the driver's automotive consciousness rather than utility/function Makes use of auto-ethnography to explore and theorise automotive consciousnessDraws upon a rich archive of literary texts from across the twentieth-century including original research into unknown writers featured in the early twentieth-century texts/motoring periodicals

Author: Naomi Segal
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137429704
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

View

Book Description
Researchers in the new field of literary-and-cultural studies look at social issues – especially issues of change and mobility – through the lens of literary thinking. The essays range from cultural memory and migration to electronic textuality and biopolitics.

Author: Éamon Ó Cofaigh
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1802070672
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

View

Book Description
An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. Since its invention, the automobile has been systematically ‘consumed’, to become part of the fabric of twentieth- and twenty-first-century society, its impact and perception making the car an accurate gauge of changing cultural norms and values. As it grew in popularity, the automobile conditioned the very texture of modern life, and the particularly car-centred society of contemporary France is an especially apt locus for examination. The ubiquity of the automobile across all social strata provides us with a defined lens through which to examine the evolution of French society in the modern and post-modern eras. Taking the Second World War as a pivotal moment in recent French history, this book demonstrates how the automobile was both consumed and fetishized in distinct ways before and after this conflict. The ways in which society evolved from the pre- to the post-war period allow us to view French culture through the prism of the automobile as it embodied technological and social progress in twentieth-century France. The present volume seeks to explore and interrogate the processes of representation and mediation inherent in the evolving patterns of automobile consumption, and their subsequent impacts on local and national identity, framed by a detailed case study centred on France from the late-nineteenth century to the oil crisis of the early 1970s.

Author: Anne Wagner
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1802207260
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 517

View

Book Description
This comprehensive Research Handbook explores the wide variety of work conducted in legal semiotics to provide a broad understanding of how the law works through signs and symbols. Demonstrating that law is a strategical system of fluctuating signs, contributors critically analyse the ever-evolving conceptualisations of law and legal discourse.

Author: Michael John Law
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1847799426
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

View

Book Description
The experience of suburban modernity looks at the history of the London suburbs in the interwar years. It shows that, contrary to those accounts that portray suburbia as static and boring, these suburbs were in fact at the heart of the adoption of private transport and new mobilities. Wealthier middle-class suburbanites enjoyed driving at speed on new arterial roads, visiting roadhouses for a transgressive night out, taking five-shilling flights from the local airport, and joining cycling and motorcycle clubs. All this fun came at a price for some in the form of thousands of deaths in road accidents, plane crashes on suburban housing and in the despoiling of the countryside through road development. This book will be welcomed by academics and students working in suburban studies, historical geography and interwar British history and can also be enjoyed by anyone interested in the history of London.