Contemporary American landscape is wrought with ongoing processes and phenomena of technicization observable at the intersections of multiple layers of society. This book brings to attention their cultural and political aspects, emphasizing timeliness and necessity of academic intervention into, and evaluation of, their specificity and ramifications. Presenting critical and analytical account of cultural narratives which define, speak of, and use diverse technologies (of writing, sound, media representations, surveillance, war), the texts compiled in this volume investigate the coalescence between technological production on the one hand, and the textual on the other. The idea of the book responds to the current academic appeal - inspired by postmodern questioning of the foundations and realized, most importantly, by deconstruction - to dismantle one of the constitutive pillars of Western civilization, namely, between techne and episteme. In their interpretative mode, the texts proceed largely experimentally, bridging the gap between techne and episteme. In doing so, they endeavor to reformulate and complexify an experience of American culture. The book aims to clarify and exemplify that the junction of text and technology implies that meanings are embedded in a material. Consequently, the publication introduces and popularizes the assumption that American cultural experience emerges as a genuine experiment of an esthetic nature.
About the Author: Edyta Just and Marek M. Wojtaszek are Assistant Professors at the Faculty of International and Political Studies at the University of Lodz, Poland, affiliated with the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies and the Women's Studies Centre. Edyta Just holds an MA in Political Science from the University of Lodz, Poland, and a PhD in Gender Studies from Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Her fields of expertise include gender studies, philosophy, pedagogy and cultural studies of science and technology. She recently co-authored a book, Tuning Educational Structures in Europe: Reference Points for the Design and Delivery of Degree Programmes in Gender Studies (2010) and an article, Gender Issues in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in the Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (2012). Marek M. Wojtaszek holds a PhD in the Humanities. His recent publications include Dancing in the Dark: Towards an Aesthetics of Sensible Encounters, in Quilting Stories, edited by Marek M. Wojtaszek and Edyta Just (2012) and Pulling One's Strings: On the Art of Transformative Endurability and the Illusion of the Limit of the Impossible, in El cuerpo en mente. Versiones del ser desde el pensamiento contemporaneo, edited by Mireia Calafell and Aina Perez (2011).