Scott Bukatman's "Terminal Identity"--referring to both the site of the termination of the conventional "subject" and the birth of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer terminal or television screen--puts to rest any lingering doubts of the significance of science fiction in contemporary cultural studies. Demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge, both of the history of science fiction narrative from its earliest origins, and of cultural theory and philosophy, Bukatman redefines the nature of human identity in the Information Age.
Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theories of...

The headlong rush, the rapid montage, the soaring superhero, the plunging roller coaster--Matters of Gravity focuses on the experience of technological spectacle in American popular culture over the past century. In these essays, leading media and cultural theorist Scott Bukatman reveals how popular culture tames the threats posed by technology and urban modernity by immersing people in delirious kinetic environments like those traversed by Plastic Man, Superman, and the careening astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Right Stuff. He argues that as advanced...

The headlong rush, the rapid montage, the soaring superhero, the plunging roller coaster--Matters of Gravity focuses on the experience of technological spectacle in American popular culture over the past century. In these essays, leading media and cultural theorist Scott Bukatman reveals how popular culture tames the threats posed by technology and urban modernity by immersing people in delirious kinetic environments like those traversed by Plastic Man, Superman, and the careening astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Right Stuff. He argues that as advanced...

Hellboy, Mike Mignola's famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy's World shows how our engagement with Hellboy's world is a highly aestheticized encounter with comics and their materiality. Scott Bukatman's dynamic study explores how comics produce a heightened "adventure of reading" in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the reader's imagination to inhabit. Drawing upon other media--including children's...

Behind the scenes of the James Bond film Spectre: Q's workshop, an exploded building in Mexico City and a helicopter crash on Westminster Bridge are just a few of the sets that appear in these super-sharp photographs
British photographers Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low have created a highly original art project based on the brilliant artifice of the spectacular sets from the latest James Bond movie, Spectre. Shooting entirely at Pinewood Studios in UK, the artist duo highlights a head-on collision of fantasy and reality by photographing the sets' massive scale and...