review – medieninitiative

New Review of Discorrelated Images in Thesis Eleven

Marcus Maloney has a perceptive new review of Discorrelated Images in Thesis Eleven (as an open-access online-first article). While not uncritical, Maloney’s review includes some high praise for the book, including this passage that I can only hope to live up to:

“I have always wondered what it might have been like to read the first edition of, say, Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), or Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992) – that is, before such texts became widely recognized as the important works they are. Reading Denson’s dense and ambitious book is as close as I have yet come to achieving that feeling.”

Read the full review over at Thesis Eleven.

Possibilities of Post-Cinema: Review of Discorrelated Images in Film International

There’s a new review of Discorrelated Images in Film International. Reviewer T. R. Merchant-Knudsen (who goes by @CriticTMK on Twitter) remarks that pandemic year 2020 was paradoxically the perfect year for the book to appear, as it aims to illuminate the unprecedented role of digital screens in the reorganization of our lives, and judges the book overall “a fantastic meditation on post-cinema that begs the reader to consider both the horrors and possibilities afforded with technological advancements.”

Check out the full review here, and pick up the book for 50% off during Duke University Press’s Spring Sale (now through May 7) with code SPRING21 if you order directly from the publisher. (Outside North and South America, you can use the same code at international distributor Combined Academic Publishers.)

“Towards a Historical Aesthetics of Encounter”: My review of James J. Hodge, Sensations of History, in Critical Inquiry

My review of Jim Hodge’s excellent book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is online now at Critical Inquiry. This is an important book — definitely check it out!

New Review of Post-Cinema in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 18 (2018)

There is a new review of several works on all things post-cinematic, including Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (which I co-edited with Julia Leyda), alongside Francesco Casetti’s The Lumière Galaxy; Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier’s edited collection The State of Post-Cinema; Vinzenz Hediger and Miriam de Rosa’s special issue Post-What? Post-When?; and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s Queeres Post-Cinema.

The review, in German, is titled “Werden/Weiter/Denken: Rekapitulation eines Post-Cinema Diskurses” (roughly: Becoming/Further/Thinking — suggesting a thinking in flux and a thinking beyond — Recapitulation of a Post-Cinema Discourse). The text, by Elisa Linseisen from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, appears in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 18 (2018). The full text is available as an open-access PDF.

Postnaturalism reviewed in MEDIENwissenschaft

medienwissenschaft-review

The latest issue of MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen/Reviews includes a nice review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface.

For those of you who read German, you can find the entire text of the review, by Anya Heise-von der Lippe (Tübingen/Berlin), here. For everyone else, here is a (rough) translation of the reviewer’s summary statement:

“Postnaturalism offers a philosophical approach and an engagement with fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions of human and nonhuman materiality, which is indispensable especially for a post-postmodernity characterized by resource scarcity, climate change, and species extinctions, as well as the threat of a return to essentialist positions in politics and popular culture. Adapting a phrase from Bruno Latour, Denson counters the latter with a postnatural position: “We have never been natural” (24). Furthermore, Denson’s detailed examination — at the level of content, reception, and production — of Frankenstein adaptations is an asset for the analytical and production-aesthetic [produktionsästhetische] investigation of a central text (or modern myth) and its many adaptations in a wide range of text-critical disciplines: from media studies to literary to cultural studies.”

(Again, the translation is rough. Tweaks are more than welcome! Especially if you have suggestions for produktionsästhetisch or for making that first sentence more readable, drop me a line in the comments below…)

Finally, make sure you check out the entire issue of MEDIENwissenschaft, which is chock full of great stuff. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, among other things: the “Perspectives” section contains a longer piece on seriality and television series’ interrelations by Tanja Weber and Christian Junklewitz.

Check out the full contents of the issue here.

ImageText Review: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives

The most recent issue of ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies (Vol. 8, No. 1) has a nice review, by Kate Polak, of Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, which I co-edited with Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein. Here’s a little taste of it:

Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives is an essential volume for both comics scholars and scholars of literature in general, because it places the most popular emerging medium in conversation with cutting-edge contemporary scholarship, and makes a strong case for the ways in which comics are necessary in considerations of a transnational, cosmopolitan 21st century world.

Check out the full review, titled “Playing at the Margins,” here.

Short review of Postnaturalism

A short review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface has just appeared in fiph journal 24 (October 2014) — the journal of the Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover (the Research Institute for Philosophy Hannover, or “fiph” for short). The review, in German, was written by Dominik Hammer of the fiph, and it includes a brief summary and a nice endorsement of the book, part of which I translate here for those who don’t read German:

Postnaturalism is not only the product of a technicization that denatures embodiment (p. 230); rather, it designates the position that the human, but also nature itself, was never natural (p. 24). Nevertheless, the theory remains beholden to the naturalism from which it takes off and sets itself apart [sich abhebt]. Setting out from this “postnaturalism,” the media theorist investigates the connection between Frankenstein films and the development of the “anthropotechnical interface.”

Denson’s book […] is no light fare. For Postnaturalism you have to take your time, but it’s definitely worth it. The work is especially to be recommended for those interested in the philosophy of technology, media theory, and anyone who wants to engage with a postnaturalistic metaphysics.