{"product_id":"learning-processes-with-a-deadly-outcome-9780822317449","title":"Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome","description":"\u003cp\u003eFiction writer  internationally known filmmaker  critical theorist  Alexander Kluge is perhaps postwar Germanys most prolific and diverse intellectual. With this translation of Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome  a novella first published in German in 1973  one of Kluges most important literary works becomes available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Written in a quasi-documentary style  this fascinating hybrid work combines science fiction with modernist forms of montage and reportage to describe a future in which Earth has been almost totally destroyed following the catastrophic Black War. The planets remaining inhabitants have been driven underground or into space where the struggle to establish a new society rages on. Whether describing the scene in China where the devastated landscape is reconstructed according to old paintings  or in the galactic realm of the Starway where giant  turf-battling  corporate colonizing forces exploit the universes resources  Kluge tells his tale by inventing various forms of evidence that satirize the discourses of administrative bureaucracy  the law  military security  and the media. He gives us some of his most bizarre and hilarious characters in this peculiar world in which the remains of the past are mixed with the most advanced elements of the future. The cast includes highly specialized women workers who have adapted to the massive gravitational field of their heavy-metal planets  a commander with lethal foot-fungus  and ex-Nazi space pioneers who  in their lonely exile from the conflagrations on earth  spend their time carving enormous facsimiles of operatic sheet music in the forests of uninhabited planets. With parody  and humor  Kluge shows how the survivors of Armageddon attempt to learn the art of civilization  and  despite the disaster they have suffered  how they set out to reproduce at new sites a caricature of a classic and fascistic feudal capitalism.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67931492909109,"sku":"ByrdShop_0822317443","price":246.6,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780822317449.jpg?v=1794212662","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/learning-processes-with-a-deadly-outcome-9780822317449","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}