Postmodern Sacred

Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres

Häftad, Engelska, 2012

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Beskrivning

From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief. Topics include how media technologies like CGI have blurred the lines between real and unreal, the polytheisms of Buffy and Xena, the New Age Gnosticism of The DaVinci Code, the Islamic "Other" and science fiction's response to 9/11, and the Christian Right and popular culture. Today's pervasive, saturated media culture, this work shows, has utterly collapsed the sacred/profane binary, so that popular culture is not only powerfully shaped by the discourses of religion, but also shapes how the religious appears and is experienced in the contemporary world.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2012-10-25
Mått:152 x 229 x 10 mm
Vikt:277 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska, Malajiska
Antal sidor:194
Förlag:McFarland & Co Inc
ISBN:9780786463886

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Mer om författaren

Emily McAvan teaches cultural, media and gender studies at Murdoch University and Curtin University, both in Perth, Australia. Her work on religion and culture has appeared in print in The Journal of Literature & Theology, The Bible and Critical Theory, and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Recensioner i media

“Recommended”—Midwest Book Review; “well researched”—Science Fiction Studies.

Innehållsförteckning

Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Return of the Religious and the Postmodern Sacred 1. The Postmodern Sacred 2. Virtual Religion: Techniques of the Postmodern Sacred 3. “Something Up There”: Transcendental Gesturing in New Age–Influenced Texts 4. Of Gods and Monsters: Metaphor and the Postmodern Sacred 5. Buffy and Xena: Polytheisms On-Screen 6. Whither Leonardo da Vinci? New Age Gnosticism 7. Christ Figures and the Messianic in The Lord of the Rings 8. The Cultural Logic of Postmodern Christianity: The Christian Right and Popular Culture 9. The Islamic Other and SFF Responses to 9/11 10. Good, Evil and Ethics: Morality and All That Stuff Conclusion: Is There an Outside to Capital? Chapter Notes Bibliography Index