The uncertain future of empathy : posthumanism, cyberculture and science fiction / edited by Elsa Bouet.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bouet, Elsa, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, England : Inter-Disciplinary Press, [2015]

Summary:

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2015. This volume investigates the future of empathy as contemplated by posthumanism, cyberculture and science fiction. As humanity increasingly networks and communicates online, the reconfiguration of human communities through the removal and immediacy of the body challenges traditional notions of humanity and human capacity for empathy. The impact of cyberculture and posthumanism on humanity and its capacity for empathy is here assessed through research in literature, films, neuroscience, anthropology and philosophy. This volume addresses the centrality of the body to human interactions and assesses how intrinsic it is to the defining of the human. The exploration of posthuman narratives which display futuristic bodily modifications also engages with the anxieties and hopes for the future of human empathy. Research in dystopian narratives shows that these anxieties are also expressed without the tropes of bodily modifications and that ideological distancing creates the conditions necessary for a lack of empathy towards otherness.

Contents:

Preliminary Material

Toying with Intention: Embodiment, Empathy and Programmed Intentionality in New Media / Mari-Lou Rowley

Virtuous War and UAVs: The ‘Inhibition’ of Friction and the Banalization of Violence / Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron

Serial Communication Experiments: You Can (Not) Advance / Antony Chun-man Tam

Cyberculture and Ethics in Generation A and Super Sad True Love Story / Reinhold Kramer

Of Flesh and Bone: Finding Human Sameness in the ‘Skinjobs’ of Battlestar Galactica / Teresa Botelho

Dreams of Sheep: Humanity as a Discursive Formation in Battlestar Galactica / Yonatan Englender

In the Absence of Flesh, Bodies Made Anew: Transparency, Avatars and the Holographic Body in Hollywood Cinema (1980-2010) / Pia Pandelakis

The Technological Utopia in Hollywood: The Surrogate as Contemporary Paradigm for Posthumanity in Surrogates (2009) and Gamer (2009) / Mehdi Achouche

Marge Piercy’s Body of Glass and the Cyborg-Human Relationship: Fear or Hope for the Twenty-First Century / Miguel Nenevé and Nayra Gomes

Digressions in Progress: Posthuman Loneliness and the Will to Play in the Work of the Strugatsky Brothers / Julia Vaingurt

Bodily Imagination from Suprematism to Cyberpunk / Colleen McQuillen

The Colonized Pastoral: Africa, Myth, Alienation and Blackness in Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels / Selena Middleton

Imprisonment in the Fiction of Christopher Priest

Totalitarian Literature: Realism and Reality / Luana Signorelli Faria da Costa.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-84888-336-6

OCLC:

1096227640

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9781848883369 DOI