Books – Page 8 – medieninitiative

Out Now: Postnaturalism

My new book, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, has been out for about a month now — in Germany, at least. The American, British, French, and Japanese iterations of amazon list the book as appearing next week, on August 22 (but available for pre-order), and it may be September by the time the American distributor, Columbia University Press, gets it listed on their website. Meanwhile, living somewhere between these worlds, I was able to get my hands on a physical copy of the book yesterday, and I’m very happy with the job Transcript Verlag did!

For more information about the book, as well as a preview that includes Mark Hansen’s foreword and my introduction, see here or click the image above (the preview can be accessed by clicking “PDF,” just beneath the cover image, on the publisher’s page). Also, if you are in any position to do so, please consider requesting a copy for your university library.

Thanks to everyone who helped me get this out there! And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it is the offspring of happy days…

Out Now: Serialization in Popular Culture

Just back from a trip abroad, I was happy to find this in the mailbox: my copy of Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg. The volume goes back to an excellent conference that took place in Amsterdam in 2011, organized by the editors of the book, where I presented a paper on film serials of the 1910s: “Rethinking the Serial-Queen Melodrama: Serial Narration and Medial Self-Reflexivity in Transitional-Era Cinema.” Now much expanded, my paper appears here as “The Logic of the Line Segment: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Serial-Queen Melodrama.” The book contains a number of wonderful contributions by Mark W. Turner, Joyce Goggin, Dan Hassler-Forest, Sean O’Sullivan, Jason Dittmer, and more:

Also, I’ve posted this before, but I can’t resist posting once more my colleague and collaborator Ruth Mayer’s high praise for the volume:

“This collection presents an ambitious and original intervention in the field of seriality studies. It captures the workings of serialization as a core principle of modernity by taking stock of a wide range of medial formats and narrative and non-narrative configurations from the nineteenth century to the present time.” – Ruth Mayer, University of Hanover, Germany

Finally, the book is, unfortunately, quite expensive in the hardcover version that is now available, and it is to be hoped that a paperback edition will appear at some point. In the meantime, if you are in a position to do so, please request a university library or other institution to order a copy, and in this way support the editors and contributors and increase the chances for an affordable paperback/ebook edition.

Postnaturalism: Cover Design

Here’s the cover for my forthcoming book, which is set to appear this July with Transcript-Verlag. Click on the image (or here) to see the publisher’s announcement for the book.

Coming Soon: Post-Cinema, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda

Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is the working title of a collection of essays that Julia Leyda and I have proposed to REFRAME Books, a new branch of Catherine Grant’s open-access publishing ventures (you may know Catherine Grant, of Film Studies at the University of Sussex, from her excellent blog Film Studies For Free, while REFRAME includes the innovative journal Sequence and a variety of other great publications and platforms).

Our proposal has been well received by REFRAME’s reviewers, so if all goes well (i.e. pending review of the completed chapters) the collection should be appearing sometime in the near future. We are particularly excited to be working with REFRAME on this project, as this means that the book will appear in a variety of open-access formats (PDF, epub, Mobi), free of charge and freely distributable! Ours will be among the first full-length edited collections to appear with REFRAME, whose publications are sure to make waves in scholarly publishing in the coming years. We are very proud to be in on the ground floor!

While there is still quite a bit of work ahead of us on this project, and though not all of the details have been finalized yet, we couldn’t wait to announce the collection; we are very excited about the group of contributors we have assembled (more info soon), and we are confident that the volume will make an important contribution to the still emerging discussion of post-cinema.

According to an anonymous reviewer for REFRAME:

“The proposed collection promises to be a landmark publication by bringing together some of the most important critical essays that have discussed recent developments in film and media cultures and a number of original essays that develop in innovative ways the perspectives and provocations of those earlier interventions.”

We will do our best to live up to these high expectations, and we will be sure to provide further details about the project in due time!

News and Reviews: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

Up to now, Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (which I co-edited along with Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein) has only been available in a prohibitively expensive hardback edition, but luckily that’s about to change: a much more affordable paperback is set to appear in September, and it is now available for pre-order on amazon.com (here), amazon.ca (here), amazon.co.uk (here), and amazon.de (here). If you can’t wait and you’re OK with reading from a screen, there’s also a Kindle edition available for a couple of dollars/pounds/euros/etc. less.

Recently, a brief review of the book appeared in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5.2 (2014); according to the reviewer, Ralf Kauranen, “Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives offers a wealth of concepts and perspectives for the study of the transnational in comics research … [and] signals the arrival of the ‘transnational turn’ in comics studies.”

And in case you missed it, you might want to check out the interview that Michael Chaney (professor at Dartmouth and contributor to the volume) conducted with Christina, Daniel, and me about the book and our experiences and interests in comics: An Interview with the Editors of Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives.

Postnaturalism, with a Foreword by Mark B. N. Hansen: Forthcoming 2014

Having hinted at it before, I am pleased now to announce officially that my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface will be appearing later this year (around Fall 2014) with the excellent German publisher Transcript, with US distribution through Columbia University Press.

I am also very excited that Mark B. N. Hansen has contributed a wonderful foreword to the book. Here is a blurb-worthy excerpt in which he identifies the philosophical and media-philosophical stakes of the book:

Shane Denson’s Postnaturalism develops [an] ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply compelling argument concerning the originary operation of media in a way that sketches out a much-needed alternative to destructive developments which, expanding the darker strains of poststructuralist anti-humanism, have pitted the human against the material in some kind of cosmological endgame. Postnaturalism will provide a very powerful and timely addition to the literature on posthuman, cosmological technogenesis. Perhaps more clearly than any other account, it reconciles the irreducibility of phenomenality and the imperative to move beyond anthropocentrism as we seek to fathom the postnatural techno-material “revolutions” that have repeatedly remade – and that will no doubt continue to remake – the environments from which we emerge and to which “we” belong before we become and as a condition of becoming human subjects.

Now, as I put the finishing touches on the manuscript and prepare for it to leave my control — to go forth, monstrously, and (who knows?) prosper — I can only hope that the book will live up to Hansen’s estimation of it and, above all, that it will make a worthy contribution to the debates over nonhuman agency and human-technological co-evolution that have recently defined some of the more exciting strands in media theory, science studies, and speculative realism, among others.

Interview on Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

Over at his blog, Michael A. Chaney (professor of English and American Studies at Dartmouth College and director of the Illustration, Comics, and Animation conference there) has posted an interview he conducted with Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and myself on the topic of comics and our edited collection Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives. Michael is a wonderful interviewer and an all-around great guy, and it was a lot of fun talking to him about our work. So take a look: here.

Serialization in Popular Culture

Above, two stills from The Perils of Pauline, which I take here as an opportunity to announce an exciting book set to come out at the end of this year: Serialization in Popular Culture, edited by Robert Allen and Thijs van den Berg at the University of Amsterdam. The book, which I am very proud to be a part of (with a piece called “The Logic of the Line Segment: Continuity and Discontinuity in the Serial-Queen Melodrama”), will be published by Routledge as part of the Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series.

Here’s a brief description of the collection:

From prime-time television shows and graphic novels to the development of computer game expansion packs, the recent explosion of popular serials has provoked renewed interest in the history and economics of serialization, as well as the impact of this cultural form on readers, viewers, and gamers. In this volume, contributors—literary scholars, media theorists, and specialists in comics, graphic novels, and digital culture—examine the economic, narratological, and social effects of serials from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and offer some predictions of where the form will go from here.

With sections on “Victorian Serials,” “Serialization on Screen,” “Serialization in Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” and “Digital Serialization,” this book is going to be an important contribution to the emerging field of seriality studies. But don’t take my word for it; here’s an endorsement from an expert in the field:

“This collection presents an ambitious and original intervention in the field of seriality studies. It captures the workings of serialization as a core principle of modernity by taking stock of a wide range of medial formats and narrative and non-narrative configurations from the nineteenth century to the present time.” — Ruth Mayer, University of Hanover, Germany

Transnational Comics Studies

Recently, I discovered an alternative cover concept — seen above — for Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (which I co-edited along with Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein). I found this on the webpage of Daniel Benneworth-Gray, the designer who was also responsible for the final book cover. In the end, I have to say I like the final cover better, but I think this is a nice concept, and it gives me a kind of a parallel universe / Bizarro world / “What-if?” / retcon kinda feeling, which I think is quite appropriate for a book about comics.

Speaking of the book, Daniel Stein, Christina Meyer, and I will be doing just that: i.e. speaking about the book and the broader field of “Transnational Comics Studies” on October 9, at the Berliner Kolloquium zur Comicforschung. The meeting will take place at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I’ll post the exact time and place as soon as I know more.

Out Now: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

This past week, I found my copy of Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (edited by me, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein) in my university mailbox — hot off the presses, I’m told, and ahead of schedule!

Interestingly, both amazon.co.uk and amazon.de list the book’s date of publication as March 23, while it appears that they both began shipping the book ahead of that; on the other hand, amazon.com and even the publisher Bloomsbury are listing the book as appearing a full two months later, on May 23, though both sites are accepting (pre-)orders and are sure to begin shipping much before then.

In any case, I can confirm that the book does in fact exist! And it’s nice to finally see all the contributions in physical form. For the time being, however, the only physical form available is a relatively expensive hardback, but a more affordable paperback will be on its way, pending sales — so please ask your library to purchase a copy!

And, in the meantime, you can get a free digital preview on Google Books, or you can order the full e-book version for about $24 from the publisher or about €16 from the Google play shop. (Please leave me a comment if you see it anywhere for cheaper.)

Anyway, we are very pleased with the book and with the high-quality contributions we received for it, and we hope it will find an interested readership at the intersections of comics studies, cultural and media studies, and transnational American studies!