Otaku: Japanâ s Database Animals

Azuma, Hiroki

ISBN 10: 0816653526 / ISBN 13: 9780816653522

Edité par Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2009

This copy may contain significant wear, including bending, heavy writing, tears, and or water damage. This book is a functional copy, not necessarily a beautiful copy. Copy may have loose pages. May not include access codes or CDs. May be an Ex library book with stickers and stamps. Dustjacket may be missing. N° de réf. du vendeur GBV.0816653526.A

Synopsis :

A publishing event--the highly influential best seller in Japan translated into English

In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on by mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.

Hiroki Azuma's Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan's leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku's ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the country's phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and America's subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database of plots and characters and its consumers mere "database animals."

A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese popular culture.

À propos des auteurs: Hiroki Azuma is codirector of the Academy of Humanities in the Center for the Study of World Civilizations at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. A leading cultural critic in Japan, he is the author of seven books, including Ontological, Postal, which won the 2000 Suntory Literary Prize.

Jonathan E. Abel is assistant professor of comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University.

Détails bibliographiques

Titre : Otaku: Japanâ s Database Animals
Éditeur : Univ Of Minnesota Press
Date d'édition : 2009
Reliure : Couverture souple
Etat : acceptable