Phantom Communities

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Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited

Author: Lonnie H. Athens
language: en
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Release Date: 1997
Rather than finding the causes of criminal behavior in external forces or personality disorders, as conventional wisdom often does, the author renews his fundamental argument that a violent situation comes into being when defined by an individual as a situation that calls for violence -- that an actor responds to the circumstance as he or she defines it. Based on the author's many firsthand interviews with offenders and on his personal experience, this book augments his call to reexamine the source and locus of violent criminal behavior.
Returning (to) Communities

Returning (to) Communities offers an innovative collection of examples and case studies into what has become a hotly disputed topic. The chapters present a wide-ranging series of interventions into the new debates over the concepts and practices of “community” and the communal. For this book, scholars have been gathered from across Europe and Australia as well as from the United States, and several contributors are involved in community practice. Returning (to) Communities is essential reading to researchers and students in social policy, sociology, ethnic studies, cultural analysis, media studies, and across all of the social sciences and humanities concerned with the communal and the collective.
Phantom Communities

Phantom Communities reconsiders the status of the simulacrum--sometimes defined as a copy of a copy, but more rigorously defined as a copy that subverts the legitimacy and authority of its model--in light of recent debates in literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies. The author pursues two interwoven levels of analysis. On one level, he explores the poetics of the simulacrum, considered as a form that internalizes repetition, through close readings of a number of exemplary literary texts, paintings, and films from both the Anglo-American and French traditions, including works by Jean Genet, Pierre Klossowski, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, J. G. Ballard, Balthus, and Raúl Ruiz. Through his readings of these works, the author follows the transformations of the simulacrum, showing how its vicissitudes provide an optic for remapping the postmodern canon. On another level, the author offers an account of the role played by the simulacrum as a theoretical concept that assumes varying analytical and ideological valences in the writings of such theorists as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. In so doing, Phantom Communities intervenes in ongoing interdisciplinary debates concerning the historical and ideological limits of postmodernism, as well as the utopian possibilities of art, literature, and philosophy in a postmodern context. Moving between these debates and the interpretation of individual works, the author shows how they converge on the fundamental aesthetic and ideological problem raised by the postmodern culture of the simulacrum: imagining the virtual communities that, at the margins of postmodern culture, are at once figured and eclipsed by its proliferating images.