Pursuing the Sublime in the Digital Age presents an historical and cultural overview of the sublime as personal experience and as described in fiction and culture. Samuel Coale offers insight into his interpretation of the sublime through analyses of philosophers and artists who have worked within romantic, modernist and postmodern traditions. His narrative is designed for use as a template through which readers can explore and examine their own sublime experiences, and will appeal to both the general public and cultural critics and scholars.

"This thesis examines a search for the sublime. Definitions of the sublime have transformed over the centuries. In the modern era, that has come to encompass an idea of the Technological Sublime. This thesis will examine a more nature-centric idea of the sublime, with a thoughtful examination of the current digital culture and it’s impact. As we continue to become more distant from our natural world, and more immersed in the digital landscape, we miss opportunities to connect with our true nature and gain-first hand knowledge of the sublime understandings that nature can impart to us. This thesis explores our natural and digital culture - culminating in mixed media printmaking and installation. Concepts of our material culture, and the non- material sublime are at the core of the investigation. Reflections on the human experience and our social culture are seen in visual imagery of invented landscapes in printmaking, forms and materials of our natural world and abstract digital imagery. Research includes time spent in nature and elements collected from our digital culture. Printmaking and mixed media combine representations of invisible forces - electric, thermal, radio, with elements drawn from the current digital culture - AI responses, news feeds, and promotions, that often ‘exist’ only briefly in our digital landscape, into the material world. They now become artifacts of this current period in time. Keywords Sublime : lofty, grand, or exalted in thought, expression, or manner : of outstanding spiritual, intellectual, or moral worth : tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality (as of beauty, nobility, or grandeur) or transcendent excellence https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sublime Technological Sublime In his book American Technological Sublime, David Nye points out a number of different places this term is mentioned, starting with Perry Miller in The Life of the Mind in America. “..awe inspired by large-scale applications of technological prowess” Digital Culture Gmail AI responses, advertising, news apps, social apps, gaming apps, time spent on a screen."--Abstract.

Interpreting the myths of the digital age: why we believed in the power of cyberspace to open up a new world. The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world. Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture—specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics—we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it "with both eyes"—that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances—the telephone, the radio, and television, among others—Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center—our icons of communication, information, and trade—and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.

New Quotatoes, Joycean Exogenesis in the Digital Age offers fourteen original essays on the genetic dossiers of Joyce’s fiction and the ties that bind the literary archive to the transatlantic print sphere of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Availing of digital media and tools, online resources, and new forms of access, the contributions delve deeper than ever before into Joyce’s programmatic reading for his oeuvre, and they posit connections and textual relations with major and minor literary figures alike never before established. The essays employ a broad range of genetic methodologies from ‘traditional’ approaches to intertextuality and allusion to computational methods that plumb Large-scale Digitisation Initiatives like Google Books to the possibilities of databasing for Joyce studies. Contributors: Scarlett Baron, Tim Conley, Luca Crispi, Ronan Crowley, Sarah Davison, Tom De Keyser, Daniel Ferrer, Finn Fordham, Robbert-Jan Henkes, John Simpson, Sam Slote, Dirk Van Hulle, Chrissie Van Mierlo, and Wim Van Mierlo.

Don DeLillo is one of the most important novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Yet despite DeLillo's prolific output and scholarly recognition, much of the attention has gone to his works individually, rather than collectively or thematically. This volume provides separate entries into the wide variety and categories of contexts that surround and help illuminate DeLillo's writings. Don DeLillo in Context examines how geography, biography, history, media studies, culture, philosophy, and the writing process provide critical frameworks and ways of reading and understanding DeLillo's prodigious body of work.

This is the first volume that examines dangerous gift-giving across centuries and disciplines. Bringing to the fore the subject that features as an aside in gift studies, it offers new insights into the ambivalent and troubled history of gift-giving. Dangerous, violent, and self-destructive gift-giving remains an alluring challenge for scholars almost a hundred years after Marcel Mauss’s landmark work on the gift. Globally, the notion of toxic and fateful gifts has haunted mythologies, folklores, and literatures for millennia. This book problematizes what stands behind the notion of the 'dangerous gift' and demonstrates how this operational term may help us to better understand the role and place of gift-giving from antiquity to the present through a series of case studies ranging from ancient Zoroastrianism to modern digital dating. The book develops a complex historical, cross-cultural, and multi-disciplinary approach to gift-giving that invites comparisons between various facets of this phenomenon through time and across societies. The book will interest a wide range of scholars working in anthropology, history, literary criticism, religious studies, and contemporary digital culture. It will primarily appeal to university educators and researchers of political culture, pre-modern religion, social relations, and the relationship between commerce and gifts.

This book reads the Gothic corpus with a thoroughly postmodern critical apparatus, pointing out that the Gothic Sublime anticipates our own doomed desire to pass beyond the hyperreal. A highly sophisticated theoretical reading of key texts of the Gothic, this book allows the reader to re-live the Gothic, not simply as a nostalgic relic or a pre-romantic aberration, but as a living presence that has strong resonances with the postmodern condition.

The book discusses the multiple issues of a digital research ethic in its interdisciplinary diversity. Digitization and mediatization alter social behavior and cultural traditions, thereby generating new objects of study and new research questions for the social sciences and humanities. Furthermore, mediatization and digitization increase the data volume and accessibility of (quantitative) research and proliferate methodological opportunities for scientific analyses. Hence, they profoundly affect research practices in multiple ways. While consequences concerning the subjects, objects, and addressees of research in the social sciences and humanities have rarely been reflected upon, this reflection lies at the center of the book.

Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque explores the profound impact that visual digital technologies are having on the practice and theory of law. Today, lawyers, judges, and lay jurors face a vast array of visual evidence and visual argument. From videos documenting crimes and accidents to computer displays of their digital simulation, increasingly, the search for fact-based justice inside the courtroom is becoming an offshoot of visual meaning making. But when law migrates to the screen it lives there as other images do, motivating belief and judgment on the basis of visual delight and unconscious fantasies and desires as well as actualities. Law as image also shares broader cultural anxieties concerning not only the truth of the image but also the mimetic capacity itself, the human ability to represent reality. What is real, and what is simulation? This is the hallmark of the baroque, when dreams fold into dreams, like immersion in a seemingly endless matrix of digital appearances. When fact-based justice recedes, laws proliferate within a field of uncertainty. Left unchecked, this condition of ontological and ethical uneasiness threatens the legitimacy of law’s claim to power. Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque offers a jurisprudential paradigm that is equal to the challenge that current cultural conditions present.

Take back your life and learn how to thrive in a world with constant distractions by building a conscious relationship with the time you spend online. In Digital Discipline, Havard Mela reveals the secret to finding balance with digital use in the modern world. Mela combines the knowledge of how humans are impacted by technology with applicable steps to finding purpose and cultivating the discipline required to build a life centered around one’s core values. Digital Discipline is for anyone ready to trade in online distractions, sapping their energy and dopamine for genuine excitement about the offline world. It breaks down the consequences of passive social media use and mindless consumption and provides a framework for people to be more presently and efficiently engaged in their daily lives. Those who put Digital Discipline into practice will experience: a positive impact on their physical health through increased activity levels better mental health through the implementation of mindful techniques strengthened relationships with friends and family. more time and energy to pursue what matters the most. ...And much more. Digital Discipline will give you the tools and strategies to be more disciplined and less distracted, leading to a happier and more effective life.