Gods & Heroes of the Media Age: From Captain Nemo to The X-Files

We are living in an age of rapidly evanescent media transformations. From radio and pulp fiction to cinema, comic books, paperback novels, television and the Internet, the twentieth century has arguably produced more media innovations than in the past five thousand years of recorded history. And whereas Heidegger had announced that the gods were gone and that contemporary modernity was an age of beings abandoned by Being, in this new book by John David Ebert, the ancient gods are found to be still alive and well and living in the various cultural environments configured by new media. Every media innovation, Ebert contends, makes new kinds of heroes possible, and in his book Gods & Heroes of the Media Age, Ebert demonstrates that though the media reshape society in drastic and sometimes unexpected ways, they can also act to bring forth new heroes who often represent old gods in new guise. In this book, the reader will find essays on heroes like Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Flash Gordon, The Shadow, James Bond, Mad Max and even Breaking Bad’s Walter White.