Postnaturalism, with a Foreword by Mark B. N. Hansen: Forthcoming 2014

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Having hinted at it before, I am pleased now to announce officially that my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface will be appearing later this year (around Fall 2014) with the excellent German publisher Transcript, with US distribution through Columbia University Press.

I am also very excited that Mark B. N. Hansen has contributed a wonderful foreword to the book. Here is a blurb-worthy excerpt in which he identifies the philosophical and media-philosophical stakes of the book:

Shane Denson’s Postnaturalism develops [an] ambitious, wide-ranging, and deeply compelling argument concerning the originary operation of media in a way that sketches out a much-needed alternative to destructive developments which, expanding the darker strains of poststructuralist anti-humanism, have pitted the human against the material in some kind of cosmological endgame. Postnaturalism will provide a very powerful and timely addition to the literature on posthuman, cosmological technogenesis. Perhaps more clearly than any other account, it reconciles the irreducibility of phenomenality and the imperative to move beyond anthropocentrism as we seek to fathom the postnatural techno-material “revolutions” that have repeatedly remade – and that will no doubt continue to remake – the environments from which we emerge and to which “we” belong before we become and as a condition of becoming human subjects.

Now, as I put the finishing touches on the manuscript and prepare for it to leave my control — to go forth, monstrously, and (who knows?) prosper — I can only hope that the book will live up to Hansen’s estimation of it and, above all, that it will make a worthy contribution to the debates over nonhuman agency and human-technological co-evolution that have recently defined some of the more exciting strands in media theory, science studies, and speculative realism, among others.

Post-Cinema / Post-Phenomenology

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Following my talk last week at the Texas State Philosophy Symposium, details have now been finalized for another talk at Texas State: this time in the context of the Philosophy Department’s Dialogue Series, where I’ll be talking about post-cinema (i.e. post-photographic moving image media such as video and various digital formats) and what I’ve been arguing is an essentially post-phenomenological system of mediation (see, for example, my talk from the 2013 SCMS conference or these related musings). For anyone who happens to be in the area, the talk will take place on Monday, April 14, 2014 at 12:30 pm (in Derrick Hall 111). UPDATE: The time has been changed to 10:00 am.