logo Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register.
2024-03-28 08:42:59 CoV Wiki
Learn more about the Church of Virus
Home Help Search Login Register
News: Read the first edition of the Ideohazard

  Church of Virus BBS
  General
  Arts & Entertainment

  Henry Jenkins on The Meaning of Steampunk
« previous next »
Pages: [1] Reply Notify of replies Send the topic Print 
   Author  Topic: Henry Jenkins on The Meaning of Steampunk  (Read 991 times)
Blunderov
Archon
*****

Gender: Male
Posts: 3160
Reputation: 8.85
Rate Blunderov



"We think in generalities, we live in details"

View Profile WWW E-Mail
Henry Jenkins on The Meaning of Steampunk
« on: 2007-06-19 02:08:17 »
Reply with quote

[Blunderov] Brass Goggles meets Paleo Future

Table of Malcontents

Henry Jenkins on The Meaning of Steampunk
By John Brownlee June 18, 2007 | 10:51:56 AM

Cory Doctorow over Boing Boing points out this riveting read by Henry Jenkins, pop culture philosopher and maverick new media thinker, linking the meaning of steampunk to the allure of retro-futurism and even the surge in the eBay collectible market.

We might take two big ideas from Jameson's account of retrofuturism- that past imaginings of the future need to be understood as historical artifacts of older ideologies about human progress and that their remobilization in the present can be used as a means of reflecting on the failures of those dreams to become realities. While Jameson's work on postmodernism suggests that the redeployment of these older images of the future might amount to little more than an empty nostalgia, he seems to be hinting here that these images might function as vehicles of historical consciousness and thus as the basis for critique. Jameson's contemporaries were quick to explore the idea that "yesterday's tomorrows" might provide important clues into earlier moments in the history of the 20th century, a project reflected not only by the contributors to Corn's collection but also by essays like Andrew Ross's "Breaking Out of the Gernsback Continuum." But far less time has been spent exploring the contemporary deployment of earlier science fiction iconography as a way of working through the gap between an anticipated future and the lived reality of the late 20th century.
it's a huge, heady read (the first of a four part transcription of a talk Jenkins gave at the Berlin Comic Conference) but one that will certainly get the gaskets of the steampunk enthusiast trembling.

The tomorrow that never was [Henry Jenkins]
Report to moderator   Logged
Pages: [1] Reply Notify of replies Send the topic Print 
Jump to:


Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Church of Virus BBS | Powered by YaBB SE
© 2001-2002, YaBB SE Dev Team. All Rights Reserved.

Please support the CoV.
Valid HTML 4.01! Valid CSS! RSS feed