From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief. From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief. Topics include how media technologies like CGI have blurred the lines between real and unreal, the polytheisms of Buffy and Xena, the New Age Gnosticism of The DaVinci Code, the Islamic "Other" and science fiction's response to 9/11, and the Christian Right and popular culture. Today's pervasive, saturated media culture, this work shows, has utterly collapsed the sacred/profane binary, so that popular culture is not only powerfully shaped by the discourses of religion, but also shapes how the religious appears and is experienced in the contemporary world.
Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres
From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief. From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief. Topics include how media technologies like CGI have blurred the lines between real and unreal, the polytheisms of Buffy and Xena, the New Age Gnosticism of The DaVinci Code, the Islamic "Other" and science fiction's response to 9/11, and the Christian Right and popular culture. Today's pervasive, saturated media culture, this work shows, has utterly collapsed the sacred/profane binary, so that popular culture is not only powerfully shaped by the discourses of religion, but also shapes how the religious appears and is experienced in the contemporary world.
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36 review for Postmodern Sacred: Popular Culture Spirituality in the Science Fiction, Fantasy and Urban Fantasy Genres
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Kyla Ward –
An erudite and pithy book forming a junction-box between an almost insane variety of philosophies, ideologies and, of course, other texts. Thought- and use-provoking in its basic premise, that the wholesale raiding of the 'real' religious by the overtly fictional creates an arena wherein people can play with belief. An erudite and pithy book forming a junction-box between an almost insane variety of philosophies, ideologies and, of course, other texts. Thought- and use-provoking in its basic premise, that the wholesale raiding of the 'real' religious by the overtly fictional creates an arena wherein people can play with belief.
Jaime Wright –
I could tell this was an expanded thesis--I think it just needed to be refined more so that the argument carries through all the chapters clearly. The chapter on LOTR seemed like it had just been dropped in. Her main concept 'the postmodern sacred' is intriguing. I could tell this was an expanded thesis--I think it just needed to be refined more so that the argument carries through all the chapters clearly. The chapter on LOTR seemed like it had just been dropped in. Her main concept 'the postmodern sacred' is intriguing.
Bookshire Cat –
DNF, not really interesting for me now.
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