Todor Hristov – författare

This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories.Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their ‘readers’ situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature.This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism.

This edited collection contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the relationship of literary forms to the formation, reception, and transformation of conspiracy theories.Conspiracy theories are narratives, and their narrative form provides the structure within which their ‘readers’ situate themselves when interpreting the world and its history. At the same time, conspiracist interpretations of the world may then be transmediated into works of literature and import popular discourse into narrative structures. The suppression and disappearance of books themselves may generate conspiracy theories and become co-opted into political dissent. Additionally, literary criticism itself is shown to adopt conspiracist modes of interpretation. By examining conspiracy plots as literary plots, with narrative, rhetorical, and symbolic characteristics, this volume is the first systematic study of how conspiracy culture in American and European history is the consequence of its interactions with literature.This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, literature, and literary criticism.

Conspiracy theorists claim impossible knowledge, such as knowledge of the doings of a secret world government. Yet they accept this impossible knowledge as truth. In effect, conspiracy theories detach truth from knowledge.Knowledge without power is powerless. And the impossible knowledge claimed by conspiracy theorists is rigorously excluded from the regimes of truth and power – that is not even wrong. Yet conspiratorial knowledge is potent enough to be studied by researchers and recognized as a risk by experts and authorities.Therefore, in order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to think of truth beyond knowledge and power. That is impossible for any scientific discipline because it takes for granted that truth comes from knowledge and that truth is powerful enough to destroy the legitimacy of any authority that would dare to conceal or manipulate it. Since science is unable to make sense of conspiracy theories, it treats conspiracy theorists as individuals who fail to make sense, and it explains their persistent nonsense by some cognitive, behavioral, or social dysfunction.Fortunately, critical theory has developed tools able to conceive of truth beyond knowledge and power, and hence to make sense of conspiracy theories. This book organizes them into a toolbox which will enable students and researchers to analyze conspiracy theories as practices of the self geared at self-empowerment, a sort of political self-help.

Conspiracy theorists claim impossible knowledge, such as knowledge of the doings of a secret world government. Yet they accept this impossible knowledge as truth. In effect, conspiracy theories detach truth from knowledge.Knowledge without power is powerless. And the impossible knowledge claimed by conspiracy theorists is rigorously excluded from the regimes of truth and power – that is not even wrong. Yet conspiratorial knowledge is potent enough to be studied by researchers and recognized as a risk by experts and authorities.Therefore, in order to understand conspiracy theories, we need to think of truth beyond knowledge and power. That is impossible for any scientific discipline because it takes for granted that truth comes from knowledge and that truth is powerful enough to destroy the legitimacy of any authority that would dare to conceal or manipulate it. Since science is unable to make sense of conspiracy theories, it treats conspiracy theorists as individuals who fail to make sense, and it explains their persistent nonsense by some cognitive, behavioral, or social dysfunction.Fortunately, critical theory has developed tools able to conceive of truth beyond knowledge and power, and hence to make sense of conspiracy theories. This book organizes them into a toolbox which will enable students and researchers to analyze conspiracy theories as practices of the self geared at self-empowerment, a sort of political self-help.

Horror and espionage collide in the most bone-chilling Stranger Things comics collection yet. When a leading Soviet scientist is abducted to work on a top-secret project, he comes face-to-face with the Kremlin's new ultimate weapon a Demogorgon! What his top-secret captors didn't count on was the resiliency of the doctor's children. While their father has been dragooned into weaponizing a monster brought back from the US, the two young teenagers are forced to embark on a harrowing and perilous journey to find him, with help from an unlikely ally: an old but extremely deadly retired KGB agent. Things are getting Stranger in Russia and all four of these characters will need to battle impossible odds in order to survive. If they survive. This terrifying collection, written by hit author Michael Moreci (The Plot, Barbaric) and featuring gritty art from Todor Hristov (Stranger Things: Halloween Special), combines the science-fiction creatures of The Upside Down with spine-tingling Cold War

Critical Theory and Marital Quarrels: Dynamics of Passionate Speech analyzes the pneumatics of conflict through a discursive archeology of police reports, court proceedings, psychiatric cases, therapy sessions, eighteenth-century relationship advice literature, and the nineteenth-century fiction. Todor Hristov argues that in order to extract knowledge from the noise of the marital fights, preachers, moralists, physicians, alienists, sociologists discarded the words as a slag, and in consequence, they were unable to explain either the recurrence or the power of discord. This study is intended as an analysis of the discursive mechanism of contentious speech based on concepts derived from critical theory, discourse analysis, speech act theory and semiotics. The discursive mechanism of quarreling is summed up in the concept of passionate speech relevant beyond family scenes, to scenes of political or public contention. This book applies the concept to examine critically the language of contemporary couples therapy and to describe the unintended effects of the passions shared by the clients and the therapists.