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Distributed for Intellect Ltd

Crash Cultures

Modernity, Mediation and the Material

Distributed for Intellect Ltd

Crash Cultures

Modernity, Mediation and the Material

Since Diana’s car crash in August 1997, media interest in the crash as an event needing explanation has proliferated. A glut of documentaries on television have investigated the social and scientific history of our responses to the car crash, as well as showing the personal impact of the crash on individual lives.

In trying to give meaning to one celebrity crash, the more general significance of the car crash, its challenge to rational control or explanation, its disregard for the subject and its will, became the focus for attention. Coincidentally, the two most newsworthy films of 1997 were David Cronenberg’s Crash and James Cameron’s Titanic, both of which generated intense popular interest.

The principal purpose of this collection of essays is to subject texts, within which crashes figure, to well-defined cultural study. The themes that emerge from this collection, which is truly experimental in attempting to draw together the resources for a cultural study of events, are many and varied. Moreover, they vary in format, in order to bring as many modes of address as possible to bear on the crashes that catastrophically and fantastically punctuate the fabric of everyday life.

192 pages | 6-3/4 x 9

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory

Media Studies


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Table of Contents

Contributors
1. Introduction: Modernity, Mediation and the Material
Jane Arthurs and Iain Grant
2. ‘Will it Smash?’: Modernity and the Fear of Falling
William Greenslade
3. How it Feels
Shah
4. Eye-Hunger: Physical Pleasure and Non-Narrative Cinema
Karin Littau
5. Crashed-Out: Laundry Vans, Photographs and a Question of Consciousness
Ben Highmore
6. Crash: Beyond the Boundaries of Sense
Jane Arthurs
7. Sexcrash
Fred Botting and Scott Wilson 
8. Cyborgian Subjects and the Auto-Destruction of Metaphor
David Roden
9. Spirit in Crashes: Animist Machines and the Power of Number
Iain Grant
10. Racing Fatalities: White Highway, Black Wreckage
Harjit Kaur Khaira and Gerry Carlin
11. Negative Dialectics of the Desert Crash in The English Patient
Anne Beezer
12. The Iconic Body and the Crash
Jean Grimshaw
13. Of Hallowed Spacings: Diana’s Crash as Heterotopia
Nils Lindahl Elliot and Carmen Alfonso
14. Fuel, Metal, Air: The Appearances and Disappearances of Amelia Earhart
Michelle Henning and Rebecca Goddard

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