Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction

Philip L. Simpson provides an original and broad overview of the evolving serial killer genre in the two media most responsible for its popularity: literature and cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.            The fictional serial killer, with a motiveless, highly individualized modus operandi, is the latest manifestation of the multiple murderers and homicidal maniacs that haunt American literature and, particularly, visual media such as cinema and television.  Simpson theorizes that the serial killer genre results from a combination of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers, inherited Gothic storytelling conventions, and threatening folkloric figures reworked over the years into a contemporary mythology of violence. Updated and repackaged for mass consumption, the Gothic villains, the monsters, the vampires, and the werewolves of the past have evolved into the fictional serial killer, who clearly reflects American cultural anxieties at the start of the twenty-first century. Citing numerous sources, Simpson argues that serial killers’ recent popularity as genre monsters owes much to their pliability to any number of authorial ideological agendas from both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum.  Serial killers in fiction are a kind of debased and traumatized visionary, whose murders privately and publicly re-empower them with a pseudo-divine aura in the contemporary political moment. The current fascination with serial killer narratives can thus be explained as the latest manifestation of the ongoing human fascination with tales of gruesome murders and mythic villains finding a receptive audience in a nation galvanized by the increasingly apocalyptic tension between the extremist philosophies of both the New Right and the anti-New Right.             Faced with a blizzard of works of varying quality dealing with the serial killer, Simpson has ruled out the catalog approach in this study in favor of in-depth an analysis of the best American work in the genre. He has chosen novels and films that have at least some degree of public name-recognition or notoriety, including Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Manhunter directed by Michael Mann, Henry:  Portrait of a Serial Killer directed by John McNaughton, Seven directed by David Fincher, Natural Born Killers directed by Oliver Stone, Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates, and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.              

Humor & Entertainment

Simpson, Philip

Movies

Southern Illinois University Press

Published in association with the Department of Conservation Montana New Zealand Book Awards Environment Winner 2001 This book is a celebration of our most easily recognised and distinctive trees - their place in the natural world, their importance to Maori, their place in the world of symbolism, art, design, horticulture, and as a national symbol. It also looks at the mysterious disease called 'sudden decline syndrome', which has caused widespread losses of cabbage trees, and research to combat the problem. Lavishly designed, the book features numerous illustrations ranging from the author's magnificent colour photographs to reproductions of the tree in art, sculpture, and popular culture. It also looks at conservation, the future of cabbage trees in the New Zealand landscape, and examples of cabbage trees notable for their great size or their particular significance in the Maori world, as well as trees planted to mark significant events or locations.

Dancing Leaves: the Story of New Zealand's Cabbage Tree, Ti Kouka: the Story of New Zealand's Cabbage Tree, Ti Kouka

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Canterbury University Press

FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-based Design

<p>In August of 2006, an engineering VP from one of Altera’s customers approached Misha Burich, VP of Engineering at Altera, asking for help in reliably being able to predict the cost, schedule and quality of system designs reliant on FPGA designs. At this time, I was responsible for defining the design flow requirements for the Altera design software and was tasked with investigating this further. As I worked with the customer to understand what worked and what did not work reliably in their FPGA design process, I noted that this problem was not unique to this one customer. The characteristics of the problem are shared by many Corporations that implement designs in FPGAs. The Corporation has many design teams at different locations and the success of the FPGA projects vary between the teams. There is a wide range of design experience across the teams. There is no working process for sharing design blocks between engineering teams. As I analyzed the data that I had received from hundreds of customer visits in the past, I noticed that design reuse among engineering teams was a challenge. I also noticed that many of the design teams at the same Companies and even within the same design team used different design methodologies. Altera had recently solved this problem as part of its own FPGA design software and IP development process.</p>

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Springer

This book describes best practices for successful FPGA design. Coverage includes the complete FPGA design flow, from basic to advanced techniques, and presents a complete, field-tested methodology for FPGA design.

Computers & Technology

Programming

<p>The Jewish community of Aleppo, north-west Syria - the biblical Aram Zova - is one of the world's most ancient, the guardian of the famous Keter Torah scroll, boasting a synagogue dating back thousands of years to the Second Temple.<br>With this collection of three stories, Sabato interlaces the history of one family - his own - with the social and political turmoil spanning over a century. The Wheel Turns Full Circle pivots around an heirloom, a Hanukkah lamp, that has made its way into the Louvre. Broken Tablets is an elegy to the lost generation of pious scholars from the Sephardic communities who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s. Truth From the Earth Shall Spring explores the mystery of a rare manuscript whose existence has been suppressed for generations.</p>

Aleppo Tales

Literature & Fiction

Sabato, Haim

Contemporary

Toby Pr

<p>The ‘mighty totara’ is one of New Zealand's most extraordinary trees. Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no. 8 wire as fence posts on settler farms, clambered up in the Pureora protests of the 1980s: the story of New Zealand can be told through totara. Simpson tells that story like nobody else could. In words and pictures, through waka and leaves, farmers and carvers, he takes us deep inside the trees: their botany and evolution, their role in Maori life and lore, and their current status in New Zealand's environment and culture.</p>

Totara: A Natural and Cultural History

Biological Sciences

Auckland University Press

<p><div>The 'mighty totara' is one of New Zealand's most extraordinary trees. Among the biggest and oldest trees in the New Zealand forest, the heart of Maori carving and culture, trailing no. 8 wire as fence posts on settler farms, clambered up in the Pureora protests of the 1980s: the story of New Zealand can be told through totara. Simpson tells that story like nobody else could. In words and pictures, through waka and leaves, farmers and carvers, he takes us deep inside the trees: their botany and evolution, their role in Maori life and lore, and their current status in New Zealand's environment and culture.</div></p>

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simpson, Philip. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Simpson, Philip

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simpson, Philip. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction

Dancing Leaves: the Story of New Zealand's Cabbage Tree, Ti Kouka: the Story of New Zealand's Cabbage Tree, Ti Kouka

FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-based Design

FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-based Design

Aleppo Tales

Totara: A Natural and Cultural History

Totara: A Natural and Cultural History