Hyperreality in Philosophy

This book explores a world where the boundaries between reality and representation have become blurred, a world where LA Law is used to train lawyers. Drawing on examples from around the globe, Nick Perry presents a fascinating and entertaining analysis of both familiar objects and situations as well as the more unusual and absurd. Meals served in British pubs, motor-cycle gangs in downtown Tokyo, Australian movies, are just some examples used by the author in his engaging exploration of modern sense of the 'unreal'. Hyperrealities also engages with well known theorists of contemporary culture, from Baudrillard and Umberto Eco to Jameson and Sartre.

Drawing on several of Baudrillard's key writings which are still only available in French, Gane provides us with the essential guide to Baudrillard as cultural critic.

This original study specifies a reflexive language paradigm for public administration thinking and shows how a postmodern perspective permits a revolution in the character of thinking about public bureaucracy. The author considers imagination, deconstruction, deterritorialization, and alterity. Farmer's work emphasizes the need for an expansion in the character and scope of public administration's disciplinary concerns and shows clearly how the study and practice of public administration can be reinvigorated.

Over the last decade Russia has seen many changes, not only in the political sphere but also in the rise of Russian postmodernism. Investigating this crucial trend, the authors cover fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality.

Professional football is one of the most popular television 'genres' worldwide, attracting the support of millions of fans, and the sponsorship of powerful companies. In A Game of Two Halves , Sandvoss considers football's relationship with television, its links with transnational capitalism, and the importance of football fandom in forming social and cultural identities around the globe. He presents the phenomenon of football as a reflection postmodern culture and globalization.Through a series of case studies, based in ethnographic audience research, Sandvoss explores the motivations and pleasures of football fans, the intense bond formed between supporters and their clubs, the implications of football consumption on political discourse and citizenship, football as a factor of cultural globalisation, and the pivotal role of football and television in a postmodern cultural order.

Soccer fandom has traditionally been seen as an important part of adolescent, generally male, identity-making. In this timely and important contribution to the field of popular cultural studies, Steve Redhead looks at the way youth culture is being reshaped by media culture in its various aspects at the end of the millennium. He looks at 'post-fandom', the style conscious shifting allegiences heavily influenced by advertising and popular music at the globalization and mediatization of sports culture through such events as the World Cup staged in America in 1994 and at the complicated relations between football and the law reflected in the public obsession with so-called soccer hooliganism at a time when the phenomena concerned seemed to be dying away. Anyone interested in the increasingly complex interrelations between an acceleration, hyperreal popular culture and a sport which has symbolised more traditional social ties should read this book.

This book calls for a new type of teacher education that empowers teachers to be self-directed professionals. The author believes that the current trend of teaching teachers to learn an empirical knowledge base which they then implement in their classrooms is demeaning to teachers and teaches them not to think. He cities the example, the emphasis on lesson plan format, the writing of behavioral objectives, and pre-packaged activities. One way to achieve thoughtful empowerment, the author suggests, is through critical action research, or teaching practitioner thinking.

The Truth of Ecology is a wide-ranging, polemical appraisal of contemporary environmental thought. Focusing on the new field of ecocriticism from a thoroughly interdisciplinary perspective, this book explores topics as diverse as the history of ecology in the United States; the distortions of popular environmental thought; the influence of Critical Theory on radical science studies and radical ecology; the need for greater theoretical sophistication in ecocriticism; the contradictions of contemporary American nature writing; and the possibilities for a less devotional, "wilder" approach to ecocritical and environmental thinking. Taking his cues from Thoreau, Stevens, and Ammons, from Wittgenstein, Barthes and Eco, from Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, from the philosophers Rorty, Hacking, and Dennett, and from the biologists Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould, author Dana Phillips emphasizes an eclectic but pragmatic approach to a variety of topics. His subject matter includes the doctrine of social construction; the question of what it means to be interdisciplinary; the disparity between scientific and literary versions of realism; the difficulty of resolving the tension between facts and values, or more broadly, between nature and culture; the American obsession with personal experience; and the intellectual challenges posed by natural history. Those challenges range from the near-impossibility of defining ecological concepts with precision to the complications that arise when a birder tries to identify chickadees in poor light on a winter's afternoon in the Poconos.