Lexington Books
Pages: 446
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9
978-1-4985-8060-1 • Hardback • November 2018 • $120.00 • (£80.00)
978-1-4985-8061-8 • eBook • November 2018 • $114.00 • (£75.00)
Doru Pop is professor of film and media studies at Babeș-Bolyai University.
Part I: Mythologies Amalgamated
Chapter 1: The Transmutation of Ancient Heroes and the Re-Appropriation of Myths in Contemporary Cinema
Chapter 2: From Centauresque to Incongruously Burlesque: Retrofitting and Infantilizing Mythologies
Chapter 3: Mythological Meme Mutations: The Puerile Patriarchs of an Infantilized God
Part II: Double Dark Mirrors in Cinematic Representations
Chapter 4: Avatars, Surrogate Identities and Post-Human Transformations
Chapter 5: Spare-Parts Heroes, Recycled Narratives, Reused Visualities and other Recuperated Histories
Chapter 6: Modern Monsters, Parasitical Stories and Narrative Viruses
Chapter 7: Desecration of Cinematic Bodies and Zombie Semiotics Excursus or A Final Walk into the Desert of Significations
From Hercules to Zombie Jim, from 50 Shades of Grey to 50 Sheds of Grey, from Game of Thrones to after-sex selfies, this book is a vertiginous guide to the current state of mythology. Pop argues that the apparently endlessly irrational recombinations of myth in contemporary culture go beyond the usual models of hybridization or appropriation. This is an encyclopedic amusement-park ride of a book. By the time it comes to its zombie-littered end you will have an entirely new vocabulary to ponder the endgame culture in which we are all swimming: you'll understand the hodge-podge imagination, cultural pimping, ugly silliness, the demise of forgetting, reasonable nonsense, superficial heroes, spectator perversity, the mingled imaginary, retroactive interpenetration, monstrous repurposing, and of course the wonderful zombie transfer of meaning.
— James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Doru Pop’s The Age of Promiscuity casts an erudite yet pessimistic look at the philosophical, cultural, and political roots of the unprecedented crisis of contemporary Western myth-making. Like his fellow Eastern Europeans Slavoj Zizek and Zygmunt Bauman, Pop’s ardent analysis – sustained by excellent knowledge of popular culture and cinema – traces these roots to the corrupted heritage of the Age of Reason, which he argues has morphed into a barrage of "significantly insignificant" contents, meant to quench our insatiable needs of instant gratification.
— Christina Stojanova, University of Regina, Canada
With an impressive profusion of examples – from Avatar to infantilized God memes to syndromes such as cultural zombification -- Doru Pop’s argument goes beyond Fredric Jameson’s pronouncement of the “death of originality” to postulate a condition far more sobering: an “age of promiscuity” in which converging media manifestations have resulted in a junk culture of puerile, irrational, meaningless recombinations, making way for our current era of “fake news.”
— Linda Badley, Professor Emerita, Middle Tennessee State University