John Johnston – författare

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25 produkter

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25 produkter

Allure of Machinic Life

Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI

AvJohn Johnston

Häftad, Engelska, 2010

858 kr

Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar

5,000 Years of Chinese Jade

Featuring Selections from the National Museum of History, Taiwan, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

AvJohn Johnston,Chan Lai Pik

Häftad, Engelska, 2011

420 kr

Kommande

5,000 Years of Chinese Jade is a concise visual survey of art-historically important jade spanning the Neolithic period to the 19th century, offering a stunning visual journey through themes and time periods important in the history of jade in China. The book is arranged chronologically in five main periods: Neolithic, Shang to Zhou dynasty, Han to Song dynasty, Yuan and Ming dynasties, and the Qing dynasty. Primary subjects and themes include ritual objects, weapons, scholars' objects, adornments and jewelry, and vessels, providing an important new resource for the study of Chinese jade.

Information Multiplicity

American Fiction in the Age of Media Saturation

AvJohn Johnston

Häftad, Engelska, 1998

352 kr

Tillfälligt slut

"With the birth of information theory and cybernetics in the late 1940s and early 1950s," writes John Johnston, "a decisive step was taken toward the immense techno-scientific transformation of the world into coded bits of 'information' and machinic assemblages." Beginning with Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the novels that have reflected this transformation have similarly assembled disparate bits of information and narrative into fictions saturated with data and transcribed "clips" from media such as motion pictures, television, recordings, and computer files. Realism having thus fractilized into high-speed collage, thought itself is redefined from the High Modernist "stream of consciousness" into what the machine psychologist Daniel Dennett refers to as "multiple drafts" or "circuits" operating concurrently in the human brain. In a series of close readings, Johnston traces how this viral influx of information into human consciousness has been replicated in works by Thomas Pynchon ( Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland), Joseph McElroy ( Lookout Cartridge), William Gaddis ( J.R.), Don DeLillo ( Libra), and William Gibson ( Necromancer).From John Johnston's Introduction: "Information multiplicities are profoundly corrosive of older cultural forms and identities, dissolving both subjects and objects alike into systems, processes and nodes in the circuits and flow of information exchange. But they also bring about new kinds of energy and even strange new forms of 'artificial life.'...Contemporary culture-or more specifically what is called postmordern techno- or cyberculture-is a restructuring process that can similarly be described: as an artifactual space created when information re-structures modern or traditional culture in order to make it a better habitat for information."

Carnival of Repetition

Gaddis's "the Recognitions" and Postmodern Theory

AvJohn Johnston

Inbunden, Engelska, 1990

1 189 kr

Skickas inom 10-15 vardagar

Although published many decades ago, William Gaddis's The Recognitions is only now beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves. Carnival of Repetition, the first full-length study of the novel, is a sophisticated analysis that places it in a new literary and cultural context .This novel of the 1950 s is unlike anything else from that decade. It harks back to the works of high modernism (exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses) and looks forward to postmodern fiction (especially as practiced by Barth, Pynchon, and DeLillo). Imitation is its major theme, one that Gaddis pursues on many levels, across several continents, into mazes of arcane knowledge and bogus scholarship, and even into the novel's structure through the repetition of prior texts and the interplay between literal and disguised quotation. Through an endless play of repetition, Gaddis confounds the reader's recognition of similarity and difference.Johnston uses the theories of Bakhtin and Deleuze (and others, such as Julia Kristeva) to map out a context for this most unusual and difficult work. From Bakhtin, he appropriates the concepts of "carnivalesque" fiction and dialogism (or a plurality of independent voices, no one more important than another). From Deleuze, he borrows the idea of the simulacrum, a copy that presupposes no original and that becomes meaningful through a process of infinite repetition. With these instruments, Johnston analyzes the labyrinth of copy and counterfeit that Gaddis constructs in his novel.