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Postnaturalism reviewed in MEDIENwissenschaft

The latest issue of MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen/Reviews includes a nice review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface.

For those of you who read German, you can find the entire text of the review, by Anya Heise-von der Lippe (Tübingen/Berlin), here. For everyone else, here is a (rough) translation of the reviewer’s summary statement:

“Postnaturalism offers a philosophical approach and an engagement with fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions of human and nonhuman materiality, which is indispensable especially for a post-postmodernity characterized by resource scarcity, climate change, and species extinctions, as well as the threat of a return to essentialist positions in politics and popular culture. Adapting a phrase from Bruno Latour, Denson counters the latter with a postnatural position: “We have never been natural” (24). Furthermore, Denson’s detailed examination — at the level of content, reception, and production — of Frankenstein adaptations is an asset for the analytical and production-aesthetic [produktionsästhetische] investigation of a central text (or modern myth) and its many adaptations in a wide range of text-critical disciplines: from media studies to literary to cultural studies.”

(Again, the translation is rough. Tweaks are more than welcome! Especially if you have suggestions for produktionsästhetisch or for making that first sentence more readable, drop me a line in the comments below…)

Finally, make sure you check out the entire issue of MEDIENwissenschaft, which is chock full of great stuff. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, among other things: the “Perspectives” section contains a longer piece on seriality and television series’ interrelations by Tanja Weber and Christian Junklewitz.

Check out the full contents of the issue here.

Postnaturalism reviewed in LWU

The latest issue of Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, a special (English-language) issue on Serial Narratives edited by Kathleen Loock (a fellow member of the DFG research unit on “Popular Seriality”), includes a review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface.

The review, by Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich of the University of Kiel, is mostly positive, though hardly uncritical. You can read the entire review here, but my favorite part must be a certain characterization of the book that appears in the midst of exposing what Büscher-Ulbrich takes as “the book’s theoretical Achilles’ heel” (namely, my lack of engagement with overtly political revolutions and with “recent post-Marxist political ontologies and metaphysics” in particular). In this context, Büscher-Ulbrich nonetheless flatteringly praises my “extraordinary powers of theoretical synthesis” and claims that

“[Postnaturalism] is one of the rare enough scholarly monographs whose collected footnotes alone provide an excellent education.”

Now, I recognize that it’s not for everyone (I have been criticized before for including “an entire second essay within an essay”) — and while I’m not sure I’d recommend taking your kids out of school and making Postnaturalism the primary textbook for their homeschooling (though you might do worse…) — I’m glad to see the footnotes getting some attention here from a reader who can appreciate the value of a page of text “below the line.”

In any case, if Postnaturalism ever sees a second edition, I’ll certainly suggest this as a fitting blurb!

Check out the entire review:

Büscher-Ulbrich, Dennis. Review of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, by Shane Denson. Serial Narratives. Special issue of Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 47.1-2 (2014), edited by Kathleen Loock.

And check out the entire special issue of LWU on Serial Narratives!

Post-Cinema: 24fps@44100Hz

ImageText Review: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

The most recent issue of ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies (Vol. 8, No. 1) has a nice review, by Kate Polak, of Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, which I co-edited with Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein. Here’s a little taste of it:

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives is an essential volume for both comics scholars and scholars of literature in general, because it places the most popular emerging medium in conversation with cutting-edge contemporary scholarship, and makes a strong case for the ways in which comics are necessary in considerations of a transnational, cosmopolitan 21st century world.

Check out the full review, titled “Playing at the Margins,” here.

#SCMS15 — Post-Cinema, Digital Seriality, and a Book Giveaway!

Only two weeks until the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference (March 25-29 in Montreal)! In case you haven’t seen it already, the official program is now up here (warning: opens as a PDF).

As I have posted before, I will be participating in two panels this year:

First, I will be serving as chair on the “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” panel (Session K7: Friday, March 27, 9:00 – 10:45am), for which I feel extremely lucky to have secured an all-star lineup of panelists: Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen (click on each name to read the panelists’ abstracts). I also feel very honored that the Media and the Environment Special Interest Group has chosen this panel for official sponsorship!

Second, I will be co-presenting a paper on “Hardware Seriality” with my colleague Andreas Jahn-Sudmann in the “Digital Seriality” panel (Session Q20: Saturday, March 28, 3:00 – 4:45pm). Other panelists include Scott Higgins and Dominik Maeder (click for their abstracts). (Unfortunately, Daniela Wentz will not be able to attend the conference.)

Finally, just for fun: A BOOK GIVEAWAY! The first person to ask me (in person, during the conference) about my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (excerpt here) will get a free copy! So be on the lookout!

Postnaturalism in CUP Spring 2015 Catalog

Some time ago, I posted that my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface had officially been made available by Columbia University Press, which serves as distributor in North and South America and Australasia. Shortly thereafter, massive restructuring of the CUP website led to the book’s temporary disappearance, but it is now back up here, and it has just appeared in CUP’s Spring 2015 Catalog (pictured above) as well.

If you’d like to preview the book, the best places to look are either at the Transcript-Verlag website (here; click “Excerpt” or “PDF” below the cover image) or the Google Books preview for the book (here).

Finally, it’s worth noting that you can get the book much cheaper than its official $60 price tag if you look for it on amazon or other outlets.

SCMS 2015 Preliminary Schedule Online — #SCMS15

The preliminary schedule for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies 2015 conference in Montreal is now online (here). As I posted recently, I will be involved in two separate panels:

First, I will be chairing the panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” (panel K7, Friday, March 27, 2015, 9:00-10:45am) — with presenters Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen. You can find the complete panel description, as well as individual abstracts, here. Note also that all participants on this panel are contributors to the forthcoming Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am co-editing with Julia Leyda.

Second, I will be participating in a panel on “Digital Seriality” (panel Q20, Saturday, March 28, 2015, 3:00-4:45pm) — along with Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Scott Higgins, Dominik Maeder, and Daniela Wentz. Panel description and abstracts can be found here. And, as with the other panel, this one too has a tie-in with a publication: all the participants on this panel were contributors to the special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture that Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I edited on the topic of “Digital Seriality.”

Now Out in Paperback: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (Bloomsbury, 2013), which I co-edited with Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein, is now out in a paperback edition: see here for details. It is available now through all the major outlets (e.g. amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.), and there is a Google Books preview as well. Check it out!

Postnaturalism now available through Columbia University Press and on Google Books

My book Postnaturalism has been out since July, but there was a slight delay with US distribution. Now, however, the book is officially available for order through Columbia University Press.

This is probably more important for university libraries, who might want to order directly from CUP (if your library doesn’t have a copy yet and you’re in any position to do so, please do consider requesting they order one). For everyone else, you can currently get a copy much cheaper through marketplace sellers on amazon.com (right now, around $38 for a new copy, rather than the $60 list price at CUP).

Finally, a preview of the book has gone up at Google Books. Check it out here.

Short review of Postnaturalism

A short review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface has just appeared in fiph journal 24 (October 2014) — the journal of the Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover (the Research Institute for Philosophy Hannover, or “fiph” for short). The review, in German, was written by Dominik Hammer of the fiph, and it includes a brief summary and a nice endorsement of the book, part of which I translate here for those who don’t read German:

Postnaturalism is not only the product of a technicization that denatures embodiment (p. 230); rather, it designates the position that the human, but also nature itself, was never natural (p. 24). Nevertheless, the theory remains beholden to the naturalism from which it takes off and sets itself apart [sich abhebt]. Setting out from this “postnaturalism,” the media theorist investigates the connection between Frankenstein films and the development of the “anthropotechnical interface.”

Denson’s book […] is no light fare. For Postnaturalism you have to take your time, but it’s definitely worth it. The work is especially to be recommended for those interested in the philosophy of technology, media theory, and anyone who wants to engage with a postnaturalistic metaphysics.