Philip Leonard - Böcker

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Nottingham Trent University.What do we mean when we talk of ‘world’ literature? What does a global, even a planetary view reveal to us about literature, culture and being?In Orbital Poetics Philip Leonard explores conceptions of the world through the history of writing, theory and culture from an orbital perspective. Starting with literary and theoretical writing on satellites, orbit and terrestrial ground from the ancient world to the 21st century, the book casts a revealing new light on what it means to consider literature and culture on a global scale. Along the way, Leonard draws on a wide range of thinkers, writers and texts: from Dante and Goethe to contemporary electronic literature; Haruki Murakami and Tom McCarthy by way of philosophers and theorists including Agamben, Derrida and Heidegger; as well as astronaut photography and popular culture texts, such as novels by Buzz Aldrin and Tess Gerritsen and Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Nottingham Trent University.What do we mean when we talk of ‘world’ literature? What does a global, even a planetary view reveal to us about literature, culture and being?In Orbital Poetics Philip Leonard explores conceptions of the world through the history of writing, theory and culture from an orbital perspective. Starting with literary and theoretical writing on satellites, orbit and terrestrial ground from the ancient world to the 21st century, the book casts a revealing new light on what it means to consider literature and culture on a global scale. Along the way, Leonard draws on a wide range of thinkers, writers and texts: from Dante and Goethe to contemporary electronic literature; Haruki Murakami and Tom McCarthy by way of philosophers and theorists including Agamben, Derrida and Heidegger; as well as astronaut photography and popular culture texts, such as novels by Buzz Aldrin and Tess Gerritsen and Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity.

Tapping into a wide range of the protocols, practices and forms of the telephone and its extended apparatus – from analogue to digital; from corded candlestick to flat, reflective interface; and from buzzing switchboard to encrypting scrambler phone – this volume examines how the literary telephone connects, and disrupts, our relationship with such prevalent and compelling preoccupations as desire, resistance, responsibility, surveillance, political coercion and warfare. Across seventeen chapters, it brings together readings informed by literary criticism and theory, poetics, sound studies, material culture, media archaeology and cultural history. Considering areas including the modernist lyric, mid-twentieth-century fiction, contemporary drama and video games, it establishes new approaches for understanding the extensive, and mutable, relationship between literature and the telephone.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2014Literature after Globalization offers a detailed study of recent literary and theoretical responses to technology, globalization, and national identity. Focusing on texts of the the 1990s and 2000s, particularly novels and other writing by Mark Danielewski, Hari Kunzru, Indra Sinha, and Neal Stephenson, it charts a departure from narratives of globalization which declare the collapse of national cultures, and it considers how national sovereignty has been reinvented and reasserted in the face of technology's transnational effects. Drawing upon recent theoretical responses to technology and culture (including work by Yochai Benkler, Manuel Castells, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, Paul Virilio, and McKenzie Wark) this book will explore how, in these novels, the notion of an inclusive globalization has been replaced by a sense of national globalism.