Editions Rodopi BV is pleased to announce following new publications in
Comparative Literature:
* Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction; Consciousness and the
Posthuman.
William S. Haney II
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2006. X, 192 pp. (Consciousness: Literature and the
Arts 2)
ISBN: 90-420-1948-4 € 40,- / US $50.-
Online Info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CLA+2
* The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s Technology
Edited by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Michael Toolan for the Poetics
and Linguistics Association
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2005. XXIII, 261 pp. (PALA Papers 1)
ISBN : 90-420-1936-0 € 57,- / US $71.-
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=PALA+1
More Info:
*Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction Consciousness and the Posthuman:
Addressing a key issue related to human nature, this book argues that the
first-person experience of pure consciousness may soon be under threat
from posthuman biotechnology. In exploiting the mind’s capacity for
instrumental behavior, posthumanists seek to extend human experience by
physically projecting the mind outward through the continuity of thought
and the material world, as through telepresence and other forms of
prosthetic enhancements. Posthumanism envisions a biology/machine
symbiosis that will promote this extension, arguably at the expense of the
natural tendency of the mind to move toward pure consciousness. As each
chapter of this book contends, by forcibly overextending and thus
jeopardizing the neurophysiology of consciousness, the posthuman condition
could in the long term undermine human nature, defined as the effortless
capacity for transcending the mind’s conceptual content.
Presented here for the first time, the essential argument of this book is
more than a warning; it gives a direction: far better to practice patience
and develop pure consciousness and evolve into a higher human being than
to fall prey to the Faustian temptations of biotechnological power. As
argued throughout the book, each person must choose for him or herself
between the technological extension of physical experience through mind,
body and world on the one hand, and the natural powers of human
consciousness on the other as a means to realize their ultimate vision.
* The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s Technology:
The Writer’s Craft, the Culture’s Technology explores the multiple ways in
which a culture’s technological resources shape its literary productions.
Literature and style cannot be divorced from the particular technologised
culture that sponsors them. This has always been true, as papers here on
literature from earlier periods show. But many of the papers focus on
contemporary culture, where literature vies for attention with film, the
internet, and other multimodal cultural forms. These essays, from an
international array of experts, are stylistics-based but not stylistics-
bound. They should be of interest to all who are interested in discourse
analytic commentaries on how technological horizons, as always, continue
to shape the forms and functions of literature and other cultural
productions.
--------------------------------------
For more information please refer to our website at http://www.rodopi.nl
or send an email to [log in to unmask]
--------------------------------------
|