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Examines images of horror in Victorian fiction, criticism, and philosophy. Focusing on the recurring metaphor of Medusa’s head, The Medusa Effect examines images of horror in texts by Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and a series of Victorian artists and critics writing about aesthetics. Through nuanced and innovative readings of canonical works by Freud, Nietzsche, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, A. C. Swinburne, and George Eliot, Thomas Albrecht demonstrates the twofold nature of these writers’ images of horror. On the one hand, the analysis illuminates how the representation of something seen as horrifying—for instance, a disturbing work of art, an existential insight, or a recognition of the fundamental inaccessibility of another person’s consciousness—can serve a protective purpose, to defend the writer in some way against the horror he or she encounters. On the other hand, the representations themselves can be a potential threat—epistemologically unreliable, for instance, or illusory, deceptive, fundamentally unstable, and potentially dangerous to the writers. Through a psychoanalytically informed literary analysis, The Medusa Effect explores crucial ethical and epistemological questions of Victorian aesthetics, as well as underexamined complexities of the mechanisms of Victorian literary representation. “ an elegant study in rhetorical analysis.” — Victorian Studies “Thomas Albrecht brings a radically different approach to aesthetics—psychoanalytic and poststructuralist rather than historicist—in The Medusa Effect.” — Studies in English Literature
Medusa - an experimental spaceship developed by the Advanced Research Department of St Oscar's University. Missing since it was launched, presumed lost in the wars, it was a project so secret that it has never been declassified. Now, twenty years on, Medusa is coming home. After one of the investigation team dies suspiciously, Professor Bernice Summerfield is assigned to help discover what went wrong. But to do so she must solve a riddle. What is the strange link between the original crew and the team now on board the drifting ship? And why do their ghosts still haunt Medusa?
With her repulsive face and head full of living, venomous snakes, Medusa is petrifying—quite literally, since looking directly at her turned people to stone. Ever since Perseus cut off her head and presented it to Athena, she has been a woman of many forms: a dangerous female monster that had to be destroyed, an erotic power that could annihilate men, and, thanks to Freud, a woman whose hair was a nest of terrifying penises that signaled castration. She has been immortalized by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Salvador Dalí and was the emblem of the Jacobins after the French Revolution. Today, she’s viewed by feminists as a noble victim of patriarchy and used by Versace in the designer’s logo for men’s underwear, haute couture, and exotic dinnerware. She even gives her name to a sushi roll on a Disney resort menu. Why does Medusa continue to have this power to transfix us? David Leeming seeks to answer this question in Medusa, a biography of the mythical creature. Searching for the origins of Medusa’s myth in cultures that predate ancient Greece, Leeming explores how and why the mythical figure of the gorgon has become one of the most important and enduring ideas in human history. From an oil painting by Caravaggio to Clash of the Titans and Dungeons and Dragons, he delves into the many depictions of Medusa, ultimately revealing that her story is a cultural dream that continues to change and develop with each new era. Asking what the evolution of the Medusa myth discloses about our culture and ourselves, this book paints an illuminating portrait of a woman who has never ceased to enthrall.
Fascinating and terrifying, the Medusa story has long been a powerful signifier in culture with poets, feminists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, political theorists, artists, writers, and others. Bringing together the essential passages and commentary about Medusa, The Medusa Reader traces her through the ages, from classical times through the Renaissance to the pop culture, art, and fashion of today. This collection, with a critical introduction and striking illustrations, is the first major anthology of primary material and critical commentary on this most provocative and enigmatic of figures.
A pilot races through the sky to stop a nuclear catastrophe in this “compelling” thriller by the New York Times–bestselling author of Pandora’s Clock (People). Vivian Henry hasn’t heard her ex-husband’s voice in three years, but it still fills her with fear. Dangerous and brilliant, Dr. Rogers Henry is calling because he’s dying. He offers Vivian a fortune in insurance money if she’ll carry out one final task for him: Take the Medusa device to Washington, DC. The Medusa is his life’s work—a thermonuclear bomb capable of knocking out all modern technology in the country—and he wants her to deliver it to the Pentagon before it falls into the wrong hands. Cargo plane captain Scott McKay is miles above the ground when the Medusa begins to speak. A recording of Dr. Henry’s voice announces that the device is active and about to explode. With nowhere to land, Captain McKay must rely on his instincts and fly like he has never flown before to prevent a worldwide apocalypse. Medusa’s Child proves once again that John Nance is the “king of the modern-day aviation thriller” (Publishers Weekly).
On the arts and postmodernism
In traditional mythology and iconography, Medusa's killing powers are attributed to visual means: the monster is slain for her looks and her effect is to kill men for looking at her. Challenging the familiar account of the modern era as ocularcentric, this book reads the Medusa-effect on the philosophy of the modern research university as rooted in an audiocentric fantasy. Author Dawne McCance links phonocentrism to an aural imaginary by tracking the trope—and terror—of the deaf ear and mute mouth in the discourse on the university that was inaugurated by Kant and that extends through Hegel and Heidegger to the present. She shows how, repeatedly, in founding texts on the modern research university, the philosopher's fearful recoil from an animal-female figure that he defines as deaf and dumb has the effect—the Medusa-effect—of cutting off his own, and therefore the institution's, ear and tongue. McCance also considers some recent efforts to shake the modern institution out of its Medusa-effect petrification.
Of all of the stories told about ancient Greece one story has been told and retold many times and in many ways. That is the story about Medusa the evil woman who was cursed by Athena. But is this the real story of Medusa? No, it is not. I know the real story of Medusa. Medusa Rising is the third and final chapter of the Dark Metropolis Trilogy
This book examines the central role of casuistry - the science of resolving problems of moral choice, known as 'cases of conscience' - in Elizabethan religious, political, and literary culture. In the process, that author develops a theory of casuistical hermeneutics in a synthesis of new historicist and post-structuralist methodologies, a synthesis made intelligible in terms applied within the discourses of ideological and epistemological crisis that late-sixteenth-century casuiatry both addressed and provoked. Casuistry gained unprecedented notoriety in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign, emerging as an ambiguous practice that continued to be claimed as a heuristic procedure while it also came to function as a locus of moral and epistemological uncertainty. The author shows the equivocal nature of casuistry to be the effect of the inherently dialogic activity of the word 'conscience'. Believed to be a sacred repository of truth as well as a hermeneutic operation, conscience both embodied the culture's received norms and subjected to scrutiny the social and political negotiations that produced and maintained these norms. The author examines the application of casuistry in wide-ranging but interrelated documents: Elizabeth's two speeches to Parliament concerning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots; representative manuals of casuistry; accounts of the secret movements of the English Catholic mission and Walsingham's intelligence network; the 'Siena Sieve' portrait of Spencer's The Faerie Queene. The author establishes casuistical hermeneutics as a central organizing principle of Spenserian narrative and charts the connection between Spenserian narrative and novelistic discourse (in Bakhtin's sense of the term). These documents yield new insights into the politics of ambiguity and misreading in the Elizabethan period, variously exploiting the casuistical doctrines of equivocation, 'honest dissimulation', and mental reservation, as well as what the author calls the rhetoric of inviolability, which was associated with the voice of conscience and appropriated by monarch and dissidents alike. That rhetoric depended on a politic self-censorship that proved indispensable to the maintenance of the culture's norms, producing narrative structures that represent scandalous - and theoretically unrepresentable - insights. Reading the text of casuistry in the Renaissance illumines the pivotal, complementary processes of reading and writing the texts through which Elizabethan culture defined itself - its texts of power, its hierarchy of values and norms, its taboos, and its tacit or naturalized protocol for determining canonical texts and 'good' readings.
Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.