Out of Sync & Out of Work

History and the Obsolescence of Labor in Contemporary Culture

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by Joel Burges

Type: Essays
Subject: Sociology
Keywords: social aspects, technology
Publishing date: 2018
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 214 pages
6 x 9 inches (15 x 23 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8135-9711-9

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Book Presentation:
Out of Sync & Out of Work explores the representation of obsolescence, particularly of labor, in film and literature during a historical moment in which automation has intensified in capitalist economies. Joel Burges analyzes texts such as The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wreck-It Ralph, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Iron Council, and examines their “means” of production. Those means include a range of subjects and narrative techniques, including the “residual means” of including classic film stills in a text, the “obstinate means” of depicting machine breaking, the “dated means” of employing the largely defunct technique of stop-motion animation, and the “obsolete” means of celebrating a labor strike. In every case, the novels and films that Burges scrutinizes call on these means to activate the reader’s/viewer’s awareness of historical time. Out of Sync & Out of Work advances its readers’ grasp of the complexities of historical time in contemporary culture, moving the study of temporality forward in film and media studies, literary studies, critical theory, and cultural critique.

About the Author:
JOEL BURGES is an assistant professor of English and of visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester in New York. He is coeditor of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present.

Press Reviews:
"Out of Sync Out of Work is original, engrossing, remarkably timely, and consistently characterized by careful scholarship and convincing readings. It is a masterful work that demonstrates the power of contemporary cultural forms to reactivate readers’ sense of history as a political medium." -- Heather Hicks ― author of The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative

"A compelling account of an economic system that has proven itself more and more willing to allow workers to 'fall into history' by rendering their labor obsolete, the book masterfully illuminates the present and its prehistory. More than this, however, it is a persuasive and vivid manifesto for the work culture itself does, one that revivifies our sense that the labor of the cultural critic, at least, is more urgent than ever." -- Annie J. McClanahan ― author of Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture

"Chronicle of Higher Education weekly book list," by Nina C. Ayoub ― Chronicle of Higher Education

"Books Recordings" mention of Out of Sync and Out of Work in Rochester Review ― Rochester Review

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press

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