Representations of Fashion: The Metropolis and Mediological Reflection between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (Bi Sheng/Juan Pablos Digitovisuo Artifacts Series)
Interpretations and Reviews
Interpretation from:
FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA | Arts & Humanities Distinguished Professor at The Ohio State University
The rest of us interpreters of culture might as well lay pens to rest.
Antonio Rafele’s rapid injection in the arm spirals us down through
rabbit holes where we glimpse with penetrating insight projections of
our urban-made psychic selves. As if lucid dreaming, we come to
understand how authors such as Poe, Leopardi, and García Márquez offer
pit-stops in our otherwise impossibly fast-forward moving,
Ritalin-induced life filled to the brim with TV, internet, and
videogames. We can reach through this illusion, but choose instead to
buy into the discontinuities of fashion that never quite satiate our
existential emptiness. Not since Baudrillard, Barthes, McLuhan, and the
Wachowski Bros has such a mind come along who can zip open reality to
show with such precision the specular and spectacular nature of our
existence...Dare if you will to step into this daydream.Review from:
RYAN SCHNEIDER | Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English and Affiliated Faculty, Program in American Studies, Purdue University
“In this provocative and pathbreaking book, Rafele shows us how a
mediological approach can radically and productively reframe our
understanding of modernist subjectivity. His lyrical meditations on the
works of Simmel and Benjamin reveal the extent to which 20th century
notions of subjectivity must be understood in relation to 19nth-century
concepts of the metropolis and the technology of photography. If you've
ever wondered what the ‘New’ in New Media Studies might actually look
like, you'll find a compelling example in this brilliantly-conceived and
well-executed study.”
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