front cover of Electronic Eros
Electronic Eros
Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age
By Claudia Springer
University of Texas Press, 1996

The love affair between humans and the machines that have made us faster and more powerful has expanded into cyberspace, where computer technology seems to offer both the promise of heightened erotic fulfillment and the threat of human obsolescence. In this pathfinding study, Claudia Springer explores the techno-erotic imagery in recent films, cyberpunk fiction, comic books, television, software, and writing on virtual reality and artificial intelligence to reveal how these futuristic images actually encode current debates concerning gender roles and sexuality.

Drawing on psychoanalytical and film theory, as well as the history of technology, Springer offers the first sustained analysis of eroticism and gender in such films as RoboCop, The Terminator, Eve of Destruction, and Lawnmower Man; cyberpunk books such as Neuromancer, Count Zero, Virtual Light, A Fire in the Sun, and Lady El; the comic books Cyberpunk and Interface, among others; and the television series Mann and Machine. Her analysis demonstrates that while new electronic technologies have inspired changes in some pop culture texts, others stubbornly recycle conventions from the past, refusing to come to terms with the new postmodern social order.

Written to be accessible and entertaining for students and general readers as well as scholars, Electronic Eros will be of interest to a wide interdisciplinary audience.

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front cover of Pittsburgh and the Appalachians
Pittsburgh and the Appalachians
Cultural and Natural Resources in a Postindustrial Age
Scarpaci
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006

Few American cities reflect the challenges and promise of a twenty-first-century economy better than Pittsburgh and its surrounding region. Once a titan of the industrial age, Pittsburgh flourished from the benefits of its waterways, central location, and natural resources-bituminous coal to fire steel furnaces; salt and sand for glass making; gas, oil, and just enough ore to spark an early iron industry. Today, like many cities located in the manufacturing triangle that stretches from Boston to Duluth to St. Louis, Pittsburgh has made the transition to a service-based economy.

Pittsburgh and the Appalachians presents a collection of eighteen essays that explore the advantages and disadvantages that Pittsburgh and its surrounding region face in the new global economy, from the perspectives of technology, natural resources, workforce, and geography.  It offers an extensive examination of the processes and factors that have transformed much of industrial America during the past half-century, and shows how other cities can learn from the steps Pittsburgh has taken through redevelopment, green space acquisition, air and water quality improvement, cultural revival, and public-private partnerships to create a more livable, economically viable region for future populations.

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