Hiding - Brossura

Taylor, Mark C.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0226791599 ISBN 13: 9780226791593

Casa editrice: Univ of Chicago Pr, 1998

Riassunto

The age of information, media, and virtuality is transforming every aspect of human experience. Questions that have long haunted the philosophical imagination are becoming urgent practical concerns: Where does the natural end and the artificial begin? Is there a difference between the material and the immaterial? In his new work, Mark C. Taylor extends his ongoing investigation of postmodern worlds by critically examining a wide range of contemporary cultural practices.

Nothing defines postmodernism so well as its refusal of depth, its emphasis on appearance and spectacle, its tendency to collapse a three-dimensional world in which image and reality are distinct into a two-dimensional world in which they merge. The postmodern world, Taylor argues, is a world of surfaces, and the postmodern condition is one of profound superficiality.

For many cultural commentators, postmodernism's inescapable play of surfaces is cause for despair. Taylor, on the other hand, shows that the disappearance of depth in postmodern culture is actually a liberation repleat with creative possibilities. Taylor introduces readers to a popular culture in which detectives--the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter--lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. Taylor looks at the contemporary preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing, and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. Phrenology and skin diseases, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas, the limitless spread of computer networks--all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation.

Embodying the very tendencies it analyzes, Hiding is unique. Conceived and developed with well-known designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellars, this work transgresses the boundary that customarily separates graphic design from the story within a text. The product of nearly three decades of reflection and writing, Hiding opens a window on contemporary culture. To follow the remarkable course Taylor charts is to see both our present and past differently and to encounter a future as disorienting as it is alluring.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion and chair of the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His most recent book isAfter God, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Product Description:

The age of information, media and virtuality is transforming many aspects of human experience. This is an investigation of the postmodern world which critically examines a wide range of contemporary cultural practices. The postmodern world, Taylor argues, is a world of surfaces, and the postmodern condition is one of "profound superficiality". For many cultural commentators, postmodernism superficiality is a cause for despair. This book, however, shows that the disappearance of depth in postmodern culture is actually a liberation replete with creative possibilities. It examines fashion advertising, and the contemporary preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing, asking whether these practices reveal or conceal. Phrenology and skin diseases, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas, and the limitless spread of computer networks are all covered in the scope of this study. It attempts to show that postmodernism has provided a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning, but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Univ of Chicago Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0226791599
• ISBN 13: 9780226791593
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 354