What only a few decades ago would have been considered a totalitarian nightmare seems to have become reality: Surveillance practices and technologies have infiltrated all aspects of our lives, forcing us to reconsider established notions of privacy, subjectivity, and the status of the individual in society. The United States is central to contemporary concerns about surveillance. American companies are at the forefront of developing surveillance technologies; and government agencies, in the name of security and law and order, are monitoring our words and actions more than ever before. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the implications of what many consider to be a far-reaching social, political, and cultural transformation.
Author(s): Florian Zappe, Andrew S. Gross
Series: Contributions To English And American Literary Studies (CEALS)
Edition: 1
Publisher: Peter Lang
Year: 2020
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 246
Tags: English Literature & Culture; Electronic Surveillance: Social Aspects: United States; Privacy, Right Of: United States; Electronic Surveillance: Social Aspects
Cover
Copyright information
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction
I. Agencies
Surveillance – A Complex Relationship
1 The Critias Fragment: Constructing and Deconstructing Control
2 Hamlet and Early Modernity: The Tragic Antagonism between Surveillance and Resistance
3 The Modern Picture in Godard’s Alphaville: Satirical Demystification of Surveillance
4 The Three Representations of Surveillance Compared with Real, Intelligence-Based Surveillance
Bibliography
Gazing Back at the Monster – A Critical Posthumanist Intervention on Surveillance Culture, Sousveillance and the Lifelogged Self
1 Towards an Equilibrium: The Cultural Logic of Sousveillance
2 The Lifelogged Self as Empowered Self?
3 Curbing the Enthusiasm: A Critical Posthumanist Intervention
Bibliography
Too Much Information: Self-Monitoring and Confessional Culture
1 Self-Revelation and the Obligation to Speak: Foucault’s Confessing Animal
2 The Puritan Origins of Public Confession
3 Privacy and the Proliferation of Confessional Culture
4 “Tyranny of Intimacy”? Confessional Culture and the Public Realm
5 The Truth Will Set You Free: Televised Confessions
6 “I Am Seen, Therefore I Am” – Confessions as Do-It-Yourself Surveillance?
7 “The Right Be Let Alone” in the Age of Hyper-Publicity
Bibliography
II. Stories and songs
Death by Data: Identification and Dataveillance in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
1 Introduction and Theoretical Background
2 (No) Laughing Matter - Satire, Society, and Dataveillance
3 Post-Humanity versus the Power of Narrative
4 Why America is Gone: The End of American Exceptionalism
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Flickers of Vision: Surveillance and the Uncertainty Paradigm in Dave Eggers’s The Circle
1 Of Mirrors and Mimesis
2 SurveillanSecurity
3 Glass Tanks and Circles of (Mis)Trust
4 Waves and Particles
5 An Uncertain Conclusion
Bibliography
The Black Box of Humanism: Surveillance, the Spy Narrative, and Literary Form
Bibliography
Rap vs. Big Brother: The Conscious and the Comical
Bibliography
III. Visualities
The Art of Surveillance: Surveying the Lives and Works of Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei
1 Topologies of Surveillance
2 The Birth of Surveillance Art
2.1 Stalking Truman Capote
3 The Truman Show Delusion
4 The Rise of Participatory Surveillance
5 Bugging Ai Weiwei
6 Ai Weiwei Bugs Back
7 Conclusion
Bibliography
Paranoia and Surveillance in Andrew Dominik’s Film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Bibliography
Mythologies of Violence in American Police Videos
1 Introduction
2 The Issue of Identification
3 Men with Guns
4 Confronting the “Other”
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Afterword
1 From Videosphere to Infosphere
2 Technology on the Look-Out
3 Surveillance in Embryo
4 “See-Changes”
5 “Rogue Pixels”
Bibliography
Afterword
About the Authors
Index
