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Responding to a plethora of media representing end times, this anthology of essays examines pop culture's fascination with end of the world or apocalyptic narratives. Essays discuss films and made-for-television movies - including Deep Impact, The Core, and The Day After Tomorrow - that feature primarily [hu]man-made catastrophes or natural catastrophes. These representations complement the large amount of mediated literature and films on religious perspectives of the apocalypse, the Left Behind series, and other films/books that deal with prophecy from the Book of Revelation in the Bible. This book will be useful in upper-level undergraduate/graduate courses addressing mass media, film and television studies, popular culture, rhetorical criticism, and special/advanced topics. In addition, the book will be of interest to scholars and students in disciplines including anthropology, history, psychology, sociology, and religious studies.
The modern world seems trapped between fantasies of infinite pleasure and the prospects of total global catastrophe. Global Media Apocalypse explores these contrary imaginings through an evolving cultural ecology of violence. Articulated through the global media, these apocalyptic fantasies express a profoundly human condition of crisis.
This book confronts the question of why our culture is so fascinated by the apocalypse. It ultimately argues that while many see the post-apocalyptic genre as reflective of contemporary fears, it has actually co-evolved with the transformations in our mediascape to become a perfect vehicle for transmedia storytelling. The post-apocalyptic offers audiences a portal to a fantasy world that is at once strange and familiar, offers a high degree of internal consistency and completeness, and allows for a diversity of stories by different creative teams in the same story world. With case studies of franchises such as The Walking Dead and The Terminator, Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse offers analyses of how shifts in media industries and reception cultures have promoted a new kind of open, world-building narrative across film, television, video games, and print. For transmedia scholars and fans of the genre, this book shows how the end of the world is really just the beginning...
Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens--typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future? This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world.
Evangelical Space. Thomas Cole and the Landscape of Evangelical Print -- Abolitionist Mediascapes: The American Anti-Slavery Society and the Sacred Geography of Emancipation -- The Human Medium: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the New-York Evangelist -- Geographies of the Secular. Pilgrimage to the 'Secular Center': Tourism and the Calvinist Novel -- Cosmic Modernity: Henry David Thoreau, the Missionary Memoir, and the Heathen Within -- The Sensational Republic: Catholic Conspiracy and the Battle for the Great West -- Epilogue.
For fans of The Age of Miracles and The Dog Stars, Black Moon is a hallucinatory and stunning debut that Charles Yu calls “Gripping and expertly constructed.” Insomnia has claimed everyone Biggs knows. Even his beloved wife, Carolyn, has succumbed to the telltale red-rimmed eyes, slurred speech and cloudy mind before disappearing into the quickly collapsing world. Yet Biggs can still sleep, and dream, so he sets out to find her. He ventures out into a world ransacked by mass confusion and desperation, where he meets others struggling against the tide of sleeplessness. Chase and his buddy Jordan are devising a scheme to live off their drug-store lootings; Lila is a high school student wandering the streets in an owl mask, no longer safe with her insomniac parents; Felicia abandons the sanctuary of a sleep research center to try to protect her family and perhaps reunite with Chase, an ex-boyfriend. All around, sleep has become an infinitely precious commodity. Money can’t buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it. However, Biggs persists in his quest for Carolyn, finding a resolve and inner strength that he never knew he had. Kenneth Calhoun has written a brilliantly realized and utterly riveting depiction of a world gripped by madness, one that is vivid, strange, and profoundly moving.
In Homemaking for the Apocalypse, Jill E. Anderson interrogates patterns of Atomic Age conformity that controlled the domestic practices and private activities of Americans. Used as a way to promote security in a period rife with anxieties about nuclear annihilation and The Bomb, these narratives of domesticity were governed by ideals of compulsory normativity, and their circulation upheld the wholesale idealization of homemaking within a white, middle-class nuclear family and all that came along with it: unchecked reproduction, constant consumerism, and a general policing of practices deemed contradictory to normative American life. Homemaking for the apocalypse seeks out the disruptions to the domestic ideals found in memoirs, Civil Defense literature, the fallout shelter debate, horror films, comics, and science fiction, engaging in elements of horror in order to expose how closely domestic practices are tied to dread and anxiety. Homemaking for the Apocalypse offers a narrative of the Atomic Age that calls into question popular memory’s acceptance of the conformity thesis and proposes new methods for critiquing the domestic imperative of the period by acknowledging its deep tie to horror.
Do you find yourself contemplating the imminent end of the world? Do you wonder how society might reorganize itself to cope with global cataclysm? (Have you begun hoarding canned goods and ammunition...?) Visions of an apocalypse began to dominate mass media well before the year 2000. Yet narratives since then present decidedly different spins on cultural anxieties about terrorism, disease, environmental collapse, worldwide conflict and millennial technologies. Many of these concerns have been made metaphorical: zombie hordes embody fear of out-of-control appetites and encroaching disorder. Other fears, like the prospect of human technology's turning on its creators, seem more reality based. This collection of new essays explores apocalyptic themes in a variety of post-millennial media, including film, television, video games, webisodes and smartphone apps.
This book is a critical examination of how newspaper and television journalists reported three catastrophes. The focus is on the processes by which journalists identified news sources and gathered data, on the professional values of the journalists and on the ways that those values contributed to or interfered with good reporting. The book is based on examination of several thousand newspaper and television stories, on surveys of more than 600 journalists and their sources, on evaluations of news accounts by independent experts, on personal visits to the sites of the catastrophes, and on interviews with more than 100 reporters, correspondents, producers, editors, and their sources. The scholarly goal of the book is to provide a theoretical understanding of the process by which reporters gather information for these kinds of stories and thus to identify changes in the journalistic routine that might encourage more accurate and comprehensive coverage of public issues. He shows how television reports sometimes influence the ways print reporters structure their stories, an effect he calls journalistic priming. He examines the ways in which Pulitzer Prize-winning stories are different from others, and attempts to integrate reporters' and sources' comments with the theoretical literature. This is the first book-length effort that uses a single research design to compare how both print and television journalists covered several major events, and to examine the interrelationship between the television and newspaper reporting. Other scholars often ignore one or the other, as though the two media operated independently.
This book explores death in contemporary society – or more precisely, in the ‘spectacular age’ – by moving beyond classic studies of death that emphasised the importance of the death taboo and death denial to examine how we now ‘do’ death. Unfolding the notion of ‘spectacular death’ as characteristic of our modern approach to death and dying, it considers the new mediation or mediatisation of death and dying; the commercialisation of death as a ‘marketable commodity’ used to sell products, advance artistic expression or provoke curiosity; the re-ritualisation of death and the growth of new ways of finding meaning through commemorating the dead; the revolution of palliative care; and the specialisation surrounding death, particularly in relation to scholarship. Presenting a range of case studies that shed light on this new understanding of death in contemporary culture, The Age of Spectacular Death will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural and media studies, psychology and anthropology with interests in death and dying.