Books by Steven Connor

Dream Machines is a history of imaginary machines and the ways in which machines come to be imagined. It considers seven different kinds of speculative, projected or impossible machine: machines for teleportation, dream-production, sexual pleasure and medical treatment and cure, along with 'influencing machines', invisibility machines and perpetual motion machines. The process of imagining ideal or impossible forms of machinery tends backwards or inwards, allowing a way for imagination itelf to be conceived as a kind of machinery, or ingenious engineering. Machines suggest to us ways of imagining the machinery we take ourselves to be, the workings not only of immune systems and neural networks, but also of dreams, desires and aspirations. This reflexivity means that representations of machines are always suffused with intense feeling. The larger aim of Dream Machines is to isolate a strain of the visionary that may be involved in all thinking and writing about machines. An imaginary machine may also be a way of imagining other kinds of thing that a machine can do and be. This is the sense in which all machines may in fact be said to be forms of media; for we have always dreamed of and with machines, always therefore dreaming through the machines we have been dreaming about.

Providing a new philosophical understanding of sport, which defines what sport essentially is and means by setting out a complete grammar of sport, treating in turn its essential elements, A Philosophy of Sport will inform, surprise and delight those who have always thought sport should be taken more seriously.

This anthology explores all the major critical approaches to Dickens of the 1970s-1990s, including psychoanalytic, deconstructive, discourse-analytic, feminist and Marxist, enabling the reader to compare and contrast different treatments of particular Dickens novels.

Gathers together interpretations of Beckett's best-known plays, illustrating a range of theoretical approaches from deconstruction to reader-response theory, psychoanalysis and feminism. Steven Connor has written books on Dickens, Beckett and Postmodernist culture.

Considers the work of the most influential postmodern theorists, including Lyotard and Jameson, and offers accounts both of the work of newly emerging theorists and new areas of postmodernist culture which have developed over the years, especially in law, music, dance, spatial theory, ethnography, ecology, and the new technologies.