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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Walter Benjamin · 374 pages
A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Mythologies
Roland Barthes · 158 pages
"This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--
Travels in Hyperreality
Umberto Eco · 324 pages
Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag · 131 pages
Twenty-five years after her classic On Photography, Susan Sontag returns to the subject of visual representations of war and violence in our culture today. How does the spectacle of the sufferings of others (via television or newsprint) affect us? Are viewers inured--or incited--to violence by the depiction of cruelty? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag takes a fresh look at the repr
The Culture Industry
Theodor W. Adorno · 194 pages
"The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodifie
Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
Noam Chomsky · 432 pages
"A major new collection from "arguably the most important intellectual alive" (The New York Times). Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
Marshall McLuhan · 293 pages
The Gutenberg Galaxy catapulted Marshall McLuhan to fame as a media theorist and, in time, a new media prognosticator. Fifty years after its initial publication, this landmark text is more significant than ever before. Readers will be amazed by McLuhan’s prescience, unmatched by anyone since, predicting as he did the dramatic technological innovations that have fundamentally changed how we comm
I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains
Chuck Klosterman · 224 pages
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Neil Postman · 222 pages
With characteristic wit and candor, Neil Postman, our most astute and engaging cultural critic, launches a trenchant--and harrowing--warning against the tyranny of machines over man in the late twentieth century. We live in a time when physical well-being is determined by CAT scan results. Facts need the substantiation of statistical study. The human mind needs "deprogramming" while computers c
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Jerome Agel · 159 pages
Pictorial presentation of the impact on contemporary society and individual man of the new developments in technology and communications media.
The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer
William Irwin, Aeon J. Skoble, Mark T. Conard · 304 pages
The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson · 304 pages
Discusses whether the brutal imagery present in reality and entertainment will shock society into a less alienated state and help create a just social order or whether focusing on representations of cruelty makes society more cruel.
Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club
Anna Kornbluh · 195 pages
Anna Kornbluh provides an overview of Marxist approaches to film, with particular attention to three central concepts in Marxist theory in general that have special bearing on film: “the mode of production,” “ideology,” and “mediation.” In explaining how these concepts operate and how they have been used and misused in film studies, the volume employs a case study to exemplify the practice of Marx
How to Be Alone
Jonathan Franzen · 306 pages
Collection of some of Franzen's essays, including the one known as "the Harper's essay". Some are edited or tweaked from their original printings. A mixture of topics but well-written and enjoyable; Franzen is as thoughtful as ever.
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Mark Fisher · 100 pages
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from po
Cruel Optimism
Lauren Berlant · 342 pages
Lauren Berlant explores individual and collective affective responses to the unraveling of the U.S. and European economies by analzying mass media, literature, television, film, and video.
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno · 192 pages
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
Herbert Marcuse · 282 pages
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
David Shields · 219 pages
An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century.Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with "reality" precis
On Bullshit
Harry G. Frankfurt · 80 pages
Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it, yet we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves--and we lack a conscientious appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory." Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential mora
The Glass Teat
Harlan Ellison · 318 pages
America: change it...or lose it! That is the powerful message of this no-holds-barred book of TV criticism, chosen from a year's worth of weekly assaults on racism, pollution, halfwitted situation comedies, corrupt politicians, asinine talk-shows, monstrous bad taste, and the fat-cat blindness of the Establishment ending in suicidal civil disorder. These 52 memorable and uncompromising hard-