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Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material
Since Diana's car crash in August 1997, media interest in the crash as an event needing explanation has proliferated. A glut of documentaries on television have investigated the social and scientific history of our responses to the car crash, as well as showing the personal impact of the crash on individual lives.
In trying to give meaning to one celebrity crash, the more general significance of the car crash, its challenge to rational control or explanation, its disregard for the subject and its will, became the focus for attention. Coincidentally, the two most newsworthy films of 1997 were David Cronenberg's Crash and James Cameron's Titanic, both of which generated intense popular interest.
The principal purpose of this collection of essays is to subject texts, within which crashes figure, to well-defined cultural study. The themes that emerge from this collection, which is truly experimental in attempting to draw together the resources for a cultural study of events, are many and varied. Moreover, they vary in format, in order to bring as many modes of address as possible to bear on the crashes that catastrophically and fantastically punctuate the fabric of everyday life.
In trying to give meaning to one celebrity crash, the more general significance of the car crash, its challenge to rational control or explanation, its disregard for the subject and its will, became the focus for attention. Coincidentally, the two most newsworthy films of 1997 were David Cronenberg's Crash and James Cameron's Titanic, both of which generated intense popular interest.
The principal purpose of this collection of essays is to subject texts, within which crashes figure, to well-defined cultural study. The themes that emerge from this collection, which is truly experimental in attempting to draw together the resources for a cultural study of events, are many and varied. Moreover, they vary in format, in order to bring as many modes of address as possible to bear on the crashes that catastrophically and fantastically punctuate the fabric of everyday life.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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June 20, 2012
Shock is the only experience we have left. The only thing we can feel.
Progress is an illusion and the world cares little for man's will and his "totalitarian ambitions".
History is not comprised of achievements and victories but of accidents and crashes. Social cataclysm and devolution are twin horrors that inform our darkest fantasies.
To cope with these horrors and to abate the stifling boredom that comes with our technological utopia we turn to voyeuristic television (the 11 o'clock news) and re-created traumas (movie car crashes, the constant repetition of the falling towers).
This collection makes the most succinct argument for where we in the 21st Century stand in relation to the 19th and 20th Century "Moderns". It is a fantastic companion to Ballard's Crash, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and McCarthy's Remainder.
Progress is an illusion and the world cares little for man's will and his "totalitarian ambitions".
History is not comprised of achievements and victories but of accidents and crashes. Social cataclysm and devolution are twin horrors that inform our darkest fantasies.
To cope with these horrors and to abate the stifling boredom that comes with our technological utopia we turn to voyeuristic television (the 11 o'clock news) and re-created traumas (movie car crashes, the constant repetition of the falling towers).
This collection makes the most succinct argument for where we in the 21st Century stand in relation to the 19th and 20th Century "Moderns". It is a fantastic companion to Ballard's Crash, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and McCarthy's Remainder.
Displaying 1 of 1 review