Comparative Media: Armor/Exoskeleton: Historical Mediations of Touch

Session 6 - Sunday 9:45-11:15am
Ching Hall 251
Presiding Officer: 
James Tobias
Co-Presiding Officer: 
Andrea Denny-Brown
  1. Armor Becoming Flesh: Stereoscopy, Technological Conversion, and the Agentive Thing. James Tobias, University of California, Riverside

    This paper applies avatar studies, critical action theories, and rhetorics of conversion to SF/fantasy narratives of endo- or exoskelatal prosthetics, arguing that Cameron's Avatar (2009) presents a techno-conversion narrative suggesting changes in the coordination of corporeal experience in technocratic capital.

  2. "In marvelous mailes": Armor and Ornament in the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Andrea Denny-Brown, University of California, Riverside

    This paper will discuss the role that late medieval armor technology and aesthetics played in questioning battlefield ethics, as well as the related subject of the pleasure derived by ornamentalized violence in late medieval English knightly literature.

  3. Feeling the World: The Body's Envelope Role for Comparative Media. Benoit Mauchamp, University of Miami

    Perceiving the world makes the body the concrete interface through which one enters in contacts with his environment, thanks to a whole network of sensations converging towards two synesthesias the communication willl approach under phenomenologist and semiotic considerations.

Session Type: 
Standing Session
Session Status: 
Closed