Description
"This volume examines pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a second-hand experience of transcendence and belief. It shows how today's pervasive, saturated media culture has utterly collapsed the sacred/profane binary and shapes how the religious appears and is experienced in the contemporary world"--Provided by publisher.
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McAvan (cultural, media and gender studies, Murdoch U. and Curtin U., Australia) interrogates popular forms of spirituality that proliferate in contemporary literature, film, television and games. She argues that atheistic rationality hasn't swept away religion, but under the aegis of the postmodern end of grand narratives, hyper-reality, and pastiche spirituality persists in both conservative and liberalized forms. Postmodern spirituality is "a paradoxical attempt at accessing spirituality" from which the entertainment industryprofits as spiritual-consumers grope after second-hand experiences of transcendence. She chronicles the new monsters and supernatural creatures of the postmodern imaginary. She draws heavily onpostmodern theorists and literary critics, particularly Lyotard, Baudrillard, Jameson, Derrida. By examining both Christian and non-Christian religions, she prepares a useful corrective to Slavoj Zizek's over-stated case against Eastern Religions as the ideologicalsupplement to late capitalism. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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