Simon Reynolds: Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (2011)

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. Band reformations and reunion tours, revivals and reissues, remakes and mash-ups … Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival resources of rock history have been exhausted? What happens when we run out of past?

Simon Reynolds, one of the finest music writers of his generation, argues that we have reached a tipping point. Earlier eras had their own obsessions with antiquity, but never before has there been a society so obsessed with the cultural artifacts of its own immediate past.

Retromania is the first book to examine the retro industry and ask the question: Is this retromania a death knell for any originality and distinctiveness of our own era?

Publisher Faber & Faber, 2011
ISBN 0865479941, 9780865479944
458 pages

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Peter Watkins: Notes on The Media Crisis (2010)

Peter Watkins (Norbiton, United Kingdom, 1935) gained critical recognition in the sixties as a result of the scandal arising from the BBC’s boycott against his film The War Game. Nevertheless, although he continued to produce a series of essential, radical works that did not fit within conventional film or adhere to the timing standards of mainstream cinema, his films where no longer mentioned or taken into account as key works in debates on political commitment and the cinematic image. Peter Watkins’s last work, La commune (1999) represents, among many other things, a curious rereading of the relationship between film and the discourses of history, by means of the rupture of the illusion of representation through the blurring of the boundary that usually separates actors from the characters they play.

In Spring 2010, the MACBA presented a retrospective on Peter Watkins, which reviews his contribution to contemporary film and, in particular, his status as a pioneer of docudrama and false documentary.

Edited by Vida Urbonavicius
Publisher MACBA, Barcelona, 2010
Quaderns portàtils (Portable Notebooks) series
ISSN: 1886-5259
14 pages

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Heather Urbanski (ed.): Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric (2010)

“Is it true that, in this era of digitization and mass media, reading and writing are on the decline? In a thought-provoking collection of essays and profiles, 30 contributors explore what may instead be a rise in rhetorical activity, an upsurge due in part to the sudden blurring of the traditional roles of creator and audience in participatory media. This collection explores topics too often overlooked by traditional academic scholarship, though critical to an exploration of rhetoric and popular culture, including fan fiction, reality television, blogging, online role-playing games, and Fantasy Football. Both scholarly and engaging, this text draws rhetorical studies into the digital age.”

Publisher McFarland & Co Inc Pub, 2010
ISBN 0786437200, 9780786437207
268 pages

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