Cultures of Obsolescence History, Materiality, and the Digital Age [Hardcover]

Obsolescence is fundamental to the experience of modernity, not simply one dimension of an economic system. The contributors to this book investigate obsolescence as a historical phenomenon, an aesthetic practice, and an affective mode.Introduction: Thinking Out of Sync: A Theory of Obsolescence; Babette B. Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman Prelude: The Obsolescence of the Human; Bill Brown PART I: HISTORY 1. Rags, Bones, and Plastic Bags: Obsolescence, Trash, and American Consumer Culture; Susan Strasser 2. Architectures of Obsolescence: Lessons for History; Daniel M. Abramson PART II: MEDIA AND THE DIGITAL AGE 3. Proliferation and Obsolescence of the Historical Record in the Digital Era; John Durham Peters 4. Replacement, Displacement, and Obsolescence in the Digital Age; William Uricchio 5. The Future History of the Book: Time, Attention, Convention; Kathleen Fitzpatrick 6. The Pleasures of Paper: Tethering Literature to Obsolete Material Forms; Alexander Starre PART III: AESTHETICS 7. The Horror of Details: Obsolescence and Annihilation in Miyako Ishiuchi's Photography of Atomic Bomb Artifacts; Jani Scandura 8. The Poetics of Patination in William Gibson; Hanjo Berressem 9. Untimely: Obsolescence, Late Modernism, and the View Out of Giovanni's Room; MaryAnn Snyder-K?rber

Is planned obsolescence a conceptual paradox? How do we reconcile our era's impatience for the outmoded with our equally strong attachment to fantasies of endurance, be they about things or people? What is the place of the human in an age of obsolescence? This volume addresses these pressing questions and more. Each essay in this collection is a gem, and collectively they do the important work of expanding the conversation about the question of obsolescence beyond the realm of the technological to those of art, culture, environment, and politics - Anne Anlin Cheng, Professor, English and the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University, USA

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