Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisIn Autonomy Nicholas Brown theorizes the historical and theoretical argument for art''s autonomy from its acknowledged character as a commodity. Refusing the position that the distinction between art and the commodity has collapsed, Brown demonstrates how art can, in confronting its material determinations, suspend the logic of capital by demanding interpretive attention. He applies his readings of Marx, Hegel, Adorno, and Jameson to a range of literature, photography, music, television, and sculpture, from Cindy Sherman''s photography and the novels of Ben Lerner and Jennifer Egan to The Wire and the music of the White Stripes. He demonstrates that through their attention and commitment to form, such artists turn aside the determination posed by the demand of the market, thereby defeating the foreclosure of meaning entailed in commodification. In so doing, he offers a new theory of art that prompts a rethinking of the relationship between art, critical theory, and cTrade Review"In Autonomy, Brown revitalizes a modernist commitment to form and offers a compelling vision of the work of art in the age of its commodification." -- Adam Theron-Lee Rensch * Los Angeles Review of Books *"Brown's argument feels, in the end, surprisingly liberating.… No doubt, there are questions prompted by the book that we still might want to have answered.… But these queries are obviously presented less as a critique of Autonomy than a plea to scholars to take up related questions in future volumes. Autonomy inspires such questions because this is a book that unabashedly and provocatively makes demands of us, in the way the very best scholarship, like the very best manifestos and all art, does too." -- Lisa Siraganian * Modernism/modernity *"A thorough and valuable commentary on the contemporary position of art within capitalism. Autonomy is essential reading for researchers and students with an interest in contemporary art in relation to the market, and for those interested in Marxist approaches to contemporary aesthetic form." -- Oliver Haslam * New Formations *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction. On Art and the Commodity Form 1 1. Photography as Film and Film as Photography 41 2. The Novel and the Ruse of the Work 79 3. Citation and Affect in Music 115 4. Modernism on TV 152 Epilogue. Taking Sides 178 Notes 183 Bibliography 207 Index 215

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Cropping up everywhere, whether steel latticework or tapered monopoles, encrusted with fiberglass antennas, cell towers raise up high into the air the communications equipment that channels our calls, texts, and downloads. For security reasons, their locations are never advertised. But it's our romantic notions of connectivity that hide them in plain sight. We want the network to be invisible, ethereal, and ubiquitous. The cell tower stands as a challenge to these desires. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewAs Steven E. Jones observes, we imagine that our mobile devices connect us to each other, and to a certain version of the world, in a manner that’s invisible and ethereal. But in fact, this illusion depends on a great multiplicity of 200-foot-tall structures that we see, or decline to see, wherever we go: cell towers. Briskly deconstructing these enablers of our digital lives as physical objects, and as quasi-magical connectors of the immaterial, Jones reveals them as secret object-icons of our time. Once you’ve read this, you won’t be able to stop seeing--and thinking about--the cell phone tower. * Rob Walker, author of The Art of Noticing (2019) *Table of Contents1. Cellspotting 2. Invisible waves 3. Camouflage 4. Ethereal connections 5. Design 6. Coverage 7. On Earth List of Figures Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisA WIRED 2020 Book of the YearObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Nothing''s bulletproof, the salesman said. The thing''s only bullet resistant. The New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen had just purchased his first bulletproof vest and was headed off on assignment. He was travelling into Mosul, Iraq, when he realized that the idea of a bulletproof vest is more effective than the vest itself. From its very inception, poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide, or Kevlar, was meant for tires. Its humble roots and mundane applications are often lost, as it is now synonymous with body armor, war zones, and domestic terrorism. What Rosen learned through intimate use of his vest was that it acts as a metaphor for all the precautions we take toward digital, physical, and social security. Bulletproof Vest is at once an introspective journey into the properties and precisions of a bulleTrade ReviewIn Bulletproof Vest, Rosen explores the significance of this war zone accessory with compelling nuance and knowledge of military history. Perhaps more impressive, though, is his willingness to explore the relationship between military protective gear and human vulnerability. * LA Review of Books *For the author, a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, the idea of a bulletproof vest (or a ‘bullet resistant’ one, as the salesman reminded him) suggested a potent metaphor for humanity’s relationship to violence, security, and mortality. His book mixes his own wartime accounts from Iraq and Syria with discussions of anxiety and the history of body armor; along the way, Rosen seeks to describe just what he was trying to banish when he put on his vest. The author’s prose alternates between being confessional and informative … Over the course of this reliably tense book, Rosen does a wonderful job of emphasizing the destructive power of warfare by framing his thoughts around account of being a noncombatant in a war zone. Overall, it’s a quick read but one with great impact, as it asks its audience not only to think about protective vests, but also about the soft, vulnerable things that they’re meant to protect. A compelling, thoughtful dive into the pursuit of being bulletproof. * Kirkus Reviews *Kenneth Rosen, war-reporter, journalist, abyss-looker, intuiter of the human spirit, presents the materials of war, stitches them together in a fascinating story that shows no matter how tight and polymeric the jacket, the true dangers of war are the mental wounds that go straight to your head. His insights into war do what they can to protect us from those wounds--but like the vest, offer an imperfect protection. Thankfully, Kenneth’s words are near perfect and perfectly moving. * Nicole Walker, Professor of English at Northern Arizona University, USA, and author of Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) *A tense but beautifully written frontlines study of war in the fashion of Michael Herr's Vietnam era book 'Dispatches.' * The Day (Conn.) *Table of ContentsPreface: Notes from My Suicide 1. Every Day Was Striking 2. A Thin Metal Sheet 3. Enjoy the War 4. Wholly Aromatic Carbocylic Polycarbonamide Fiber Having Orientation Angle of Less Than About 45 Degrees 5. PPE for Your Thoughts? 6. Support Your Local War Correspondent 7. A Cult of Anxiety 8. Safety is a Cabin in the Woods References Acknowledgments Index

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Book SynopsisPosing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art views the long and provocative tradition of representing the sexual act in Western art as an occasion for challenging assumptions about personhood. It is uncontroversial that what Singer dubs the sex image, the artist's posing of human figures in the act of coitus, is an enduring compositional armature for artists from antiquity to the present. Singer, however, makes the quite controversial claim that this aesthetic practice, in literature and painting especially, serves as a powerful métier for exploring how the mind is continuous with the sensuously lively body rather than its rationalistic antagonist. Singer draws upon a rich philosophical traditionfrom the Greek Stoics, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hegel to contemporary theorists of perception and aesthetic agencyto show how the stakes of aesthetic experience epitomized in the sex image are essentially ethical. Referencing a broad range of image-based arTrade ReviewThis risk-taking, fearless book is a continually rewarding act of looking and feeling and thinking, insisting on their intimacy but also enacting it on the page, where Singer's intellectual reach and analytical rigor produce an abundance of arresting perceptions of sensuous aesthetic experience. * Ross Posnock, Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University, USA *Drawing elegantly on Hegel and Spinoza, as well as contemporaries like John McDowell, Alan Singer regards aesthetic depictions of sex not merely as lewd images, or objects for the male gaze, but as a matrix through which personhood is made intelligible. Posing Sex invites us to see in such images how conceptual capacities are at work in the deliverances of our senses, and how knowledge of self and others can be achieved where we least expect it. * Paul A. Kottman, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, The New School for Social Research, USA, and author of Love as Human Freedom (2017) *[R]emarkably sensitive and intricate in surveying how aesthetic moments may connect to more comprehensive aspects of life by virtue of the kinds of ‘mindfulness’ they pursue … Singer deploys a unique mode of argument that we might best characterize as philosophical bricolage. * Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley, JML Blog Review Roundtable, JML Blog Review Roundtable *A leading virtue of Alan Singer's Posing Sex is its commitment to a theorization of literary and visual art that might please even the opponents of aesthetics. Those partisans will find no shrinking from action here … One value of Singer's literary-critical iconoclasm lies in his ability to bring into the domain of mindedness and action texts that range from Lady Chatterley's Lover to Henry Miller's Sexus to Lolita; and to do the same for erotically-charged visual art by Balthus or Bacon or John Currin, and for the film art of Lars Von Trier. * Robert L. Caserio, The Pennsylvania State University, JML co-editor, JML Blog Review Roundtable *I urge [readers] to ‘taste and see’ for themselves, and in the reading of the entire book … they will experience the surprises of informed and just critical judgments and the shocks of new aesthetic experiences. * Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University, JML co-editor, JML Blog Review Roundtable *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Posing Sex: Prospects for a Perceptual Ethics 2. Learning from Imagination: Re-Imagining Moral Knowledge 3. The Senses of Personhood: Beyond Allegories of the Body 4. The Impositions of Perception 5. Knowledge in the Flesh Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. OK as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for all correct when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age. Nearly ubiquitous and often overlooked, OK illustrates the never-ending dance between language, technology, and culture, and offers lessons for our own techno-historical moment. ObjecTrade Review[A] slim and lucid addition to the Object Lessons series. . . . McSweeney traces the word's evolution through the present, illuminating the ways in which its meaning developed over time. * The Millions *More than just OK. . . . A quick and fascinating read. . . . Short, but mentally nutritious. * The DreamCage *A concise yet wide-ranging tour though the history of how technology has influenced the way we talk with each other. * Gretchen McCulloch, linguist and author of Because Internet *OK is more than just okay—it's the handiest and most up-to-date account of this mysterious yet deathless little expression available. Witness the history of something we say all day every day that's actually new enough that it would have left Thomas Jefferson scratching his head. * John McWhorter, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Columbia University, USA, author of Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter Then, Now and Forever and host of the podcast Lexicon Valley *Table of Contents1. Ok (Introduction) 2. Oll Korrect (Origins) 3. Ok? (Alternative Origins) Grains of Truth An Exotic Loanword Food 4. Olde Kinderhook (Branding) Ok Products 5. Okay (Literature) 6. Oh-kay (Telephone) A Modern Ok 7. Ok! (Television) Culture, Technology, and War 8. K (the Internet) Bulletin Board Systems 9. Kk (Social Media) English 10. [OK emoji] (Gesture) 11. O.k. Ok, Ok, Lol (Conclusion) Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe interdisciplinary French-American thinker René Girard (1923-2015) has been one of the towering figures of the humanities in the last half-century. The title of René Girard's first book offered his own thesis in summary form: romantic lie and novelistic truth [mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque]. And yet, for a thinker whose career began by an engagement with literature, it came as a shock to some that, in La Conversion de l'art, Girard asserted that the novel may be an outmoded form for revealing humans to themselves. However, Girard never specified what, if anything, might take the place of the novel. This collection of essays is one attempt at answering this question, by offering a series of analyses of films that aims to test mimetic theory in an area in which relatively little has so far been offered. Does it make any sense to talk of vérité filmique? In addition, Mimetic Theory and Film is a response to the widespread objection that there is nTrade ReviewRecognizing a growing interest at the international level, this volume is a timely publication in studies of film, philosophy, and the work of René Girard, exploring with insight and acuity the intersections of mimetic dynamics, sacrifice, and the moving image. Assembling authoritative critical voices on mimetic theory and analysing both classic and recent films, this book shows the hermeneutical and critical productivity of Girard's theoretical insights for film studies. A must-read for anyone in the field. * Pierpaolo Antonello, Reader in Modern Italian Literature and Culture, University of Cambridge, UK, and co-editor of Mimesis, Desire, and the Novel: René Girard and Literary Criticism (2015) *A strong collection of major Girard scholars who persuasively argue for reading film through René Girard’s mimetic theory. The introduction by Fleming and Bubbio itself is a valuable guide for extending Girard’s ideas. This volume will be of great interest and use for readers in film studies, popular culture, and those following the exciting (re)turn to Girard occurring at Bloomsbury. * William A. Johnsen, Professor of English, Michigan State University, USA, and editor of Contagion: The Journal of The Colloquium on Violence and Religion *For over fifty years, Rene´ Girard's mimetic theory has given us a startling way of reading texts, especially novels and other classic literature. His approach identifies a strong complicity between ‘the sacred’ and the violence which is at the root of social and cultural formation. The present volume offers an overdue extension of this hermeneutic, by exploring the mimetic dimension of cinema. However, the essays are far from being a simple mechanical application of Girard's theory. Once again, the remarkable energy and creativity of the Australian circle of Girardian scholars have yielded fresh questions, but also a new fertility, with regard to Girardian theory. * Michael Kirwan, SJ, Research Associate, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK, and co-editor of Philosophy, Theology and the Jesuit Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2017) *Table of ContentsNotes on Editors and Contributors Introduction Diego Bubbio and Chris Fleming, Western Sydney University, Australia 1. Buñuel’s Apocalypse Now Andrew McKenna, Loyola University Chicago, USA 2. On Fiction and Truth: Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing Paul Dumouchel, Ritsumeikan Uiversity, Japan 3. Passing "The Imitation Game": Ex Machina, the Ethical, and Mimetic Theory Sandor Goodhart, Purdue University, USA 4. Femina ex-machina Jean-Pierre Dupuy, École Polytechnique, Paris, France 5. Looking for a Scapegoat and Finding Oneself: Kieslowski’s Decalogue and Mimetic Theory Jeremiah Alberg, International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan 6. Violence and Politics in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood Richard van Oort, University of Victoria, Canada 7. The Screenic Age Eric Gans, UCLA, USA 8. A Sacrificial Crisis Not Far Away: Star Wars as a Genuinely Modern Mythology Paolo Diego Bubbio, Western Sydney University, Australia 9. Mimetic Magic and Anti-Sacrificial Slayage: A Girardian Reading of Buffy the Vampire Slayer George A. Dunn, University of Indianapolis, USA, and Brian McDonald, Indiana University, USA 10. It’s Not the End of the World: Post-Apocalyptic Flourishing in Cartoon Network's Adventure Time Emma A. Jane, University of New South Wales, Australia Index

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Book SynopsisAmanda Parrish Morgan is a Writing Instructor at Fairfield University and a Westport Writers' Workshop Instructor. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Guernica, The Millions, The Rumpus, The American Scholar, Women's Running, JSTOR Daily, Ploughshares, and N+1, among other places.Trade ReviewFor Morgan, strollers aren't just tools we use, or products we buy; they're dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. * New Yorker *Designed objects tell stories, and the stroller is no different - except perhaps that it's a typology that has received little sustained critical framing until this text. A compelling writer, Amanda Parrish Morgan deftly weaves together conversations around aspiration, accessibility, and aesthetics as they relate to this accouterment of modern parenthood and posits the stroller as a complex and sometimes confounding topic worthy of our attention and inquiry. This is an immensely readable volume, and we’re proud to have it on our bookshelves. * Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, authors of Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births *Part object history, part capitalist critique, a consistently acute and deeply felt depiction of the pleasures, traps, thrills, and dangers of early parenthood, Amanda Parrish Morgan's Stroller compellingly depicts the history and taxonomy of this most weighty and unruly device, ally, and antagonist. * Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want *Table of Contents1. Child-Friendly and Child-Centric 2. Carry the Baby 3. The Pram in the Hall 4. Prams of Good and Evil 5. The Years of Magical Worrying 6. Get Your Body Back 7. Strolling 8. A Taxonomy of Stroller as Metaphor Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture.Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewHaving spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it’s more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad. * Rada Owen, USA Olympic Swim Team, 2000 *A beautifully associative work, in which Florczyk makes visible the often-hidden role that swimming pools have long played in the global artistic, cultural, and literary landscape. Whether shaped like kidney beans and back lit or of Olympic dimensions with the perfect gutters and that ever-present black line—whether sighted jewel-like from the air as signs of suburban ‘white flight,’ or drained, abandoned, and re-appropriated by the skateboarders who also surf—swimming pools are emblems of everything from sanctuary, to privilege, to athleticism, to leisure. Florczyk’s language flows around this object, and I encourage all readers to plunge in. * Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and College Dean of Undergraduate Education, University of Southern California, USA *Table of Contents1. Where Do You Swim? 2. What Is Your Pool? 3. Why Do You Swim? 4. Who Gets to Swim? Afterword: From Pool to Page Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom enabled by new technologies as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFew people have thought as hard or as well about magazines as Jeff Jarvis does. He describes Magazine as an elegy, and it's a beautiful one, but it's so much more—a love letter to the heyday of a glorious form, a roundhouse punch thrown at those who failed as its custodians, an elegant and insightful history of a medium, and a vivid, funny, unsparing memoir. It's a pleasure to read him, and a privilege to learn from him. * Mark Harris, journalist and author of Mike Nichols: A Life (2021) *A starter, lover, student, and doubter of magazines, Jeff Jarvis is here to explain to us—in beautiful and entertaining prose—what the magazine was when it was great, and how the internet undid it, by wiring us together in a different way, and giving everyone a printing press. The call that magazines once answered is still heard, he argues. It is to ‘set the idea of community free from geography.' * Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University, USA *Having devoted a chunk of my life to writing for and editing magazines, I wondered whether Jeff Jarvis’s smart little chronicle, Magazine, would feel like nostalgia or PTSD. He opened so well, it ceased to matter. * The Common Reader *Table of Contents1. The End 2. The Beginning of the End 3. The Beginning 4. Magazines' Golden Century 5. Inside the Gilded Factory 6. Tangled in the Web 7. Next Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisMarc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.Trade ReviewA thoughtful, complex book that integrates aesthetic philosophy, close textual readings, and literary theories, all of which eventually make a leap to talk about what we mean by culture, history, and humanity, what we do when we read or teach literature, and why the twentieth-century institutionalization of literature has generated the curious phenomenon of ‘literary theory'. -- Lorely French * European Romantic Review *

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Book SynopsisWhat do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world. Trade Review"This stylishly written book offers a series of masterful examples of the value of close reading, opening up provocative connections between formality and filthiness, detachment and disgust."—Eugenie Brinkema, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"A smart, lively, consistently unsettling book. Clark's superb analysis of works that are at once grotesque and clinical boldly charts the sentimental politics of affect and identification for our age of data-driven cool."—Justus Nieland, Michigan State University"Clark has written a groundbreaking and timely book, one that interrogates the social implications of the flat registers that digital and visual culture create. She disrupts our relationships with sleek digital artifacts and the consequential flat affects that shape our everyday lives. And in doing so, she pushes on the limits of what the digital humanities can be and do."—Liliana M. Naydan, American Literary HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Graphic and the Graph-ick 1. The American Grotesque: A Graphic Digest 2. The Ethnographic 3. The Pornographic 4. The Infographic Conclusion: Identification and Its Discontents

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Book SynopsisOn the complex aesthetics and ontology at work in Étienne Souriau’s unique oeuvre In this concise but expansive exegesis of the philosophical aesthetics of Étienne Souriau, philosopher David Lapoujade provides a lucid introduction to many of the key concepts underpinning Souriau’s existential pluralism. Among the various modes of existence that populate a world, Souriau grants particular importance to virtual beings—the lesserexistences. Always taking the form of a sketch or an outline, the perfection of such existences lies precisely in the incompletion with which they imbue all reality. They exist with a problematizing force, posing questions and inviting the establishment of an “art” that would make them more real. And yet, for this to happen, another existence must first see them—must be capable of hearing their appeals—and must be willing to defend their right to exist.Through discussions of modern art ranging from the dispossessed characters of Kafka and Beckett to the grids of Agnes Martin and the protographies of Oscar Muñoz, Lapoujade leads the reader into a complex philosophical world, brimming with modal existences and animated by a unique conception of creative processes, where the philosopher as artist or artist as philosopher becomes an advocate, defending the right of certain realities to gain in existence. For Souriau, nothing is given in advance, everything is a work in the making: such is the instaurative practice that grounds his entire oeuvre.Table of ContentsContentsAbbreviations1. One Monad Too Many?2. Modes of Existence3. How to See4. Distentio animi5. Of Instauration6. The DispossessedAppendix. Art and PhilosophyÉtienne SouriauNotes

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Book SynopsisHow does the avant-garde create spaces in everyday life that subvert regimes of economic and political control? How do art, aesthetics and activism inform one another? And how do strategic spaces of creativity become the basis for new forms of production and governance? The Composition of Movements to Come reconsiders the history and the practices of the avant-garde, from the Situationists to the Art Strike, revolutionary Constructivism to Laibach and Neue Slowenische Kunst, through an autonomist Marxist framework. Moving the framework beyond an overly narrow class analysis, the book explores broader questions of the changing nature of cultural labor and forms of resistance around this labor. It examines a doubly articulated process of refusal: the refusal of separating art from daily life and the re-fusing of these antagonistic energies by capitalist production and governance. This relationship opens up a new terrain for strategic thought in relation to everyday politics, where the history of the avant-garde is no longer separated from broader questions of political economy or movement, but becomes a point around which to reorient these considerations.Trade Review“Shukaitis's project is further distinguished by his emphasis on using avant-garde artistic practices as a means of mobilizing labor’s autonomy within deterritorialized capitalist spaces. [T]his is where the drift of his research moves into high gear.” * Critical Inquiry *Stevphen Shukaitis's new book makes a forcible and compelling contribution to a rejuvenated discussion on avant-garde art and politics. . . .This is much to appreciate in Shukaitis's book. . . .[It is] a strategic vision, and Shukaitis's Dada games and partisan misdirection make for a spirited experiment in pataphysical writing in the context of the real subsumption of labor. * Afterimage *With The Composition of Movements to Come Stevphen Shukaitis does again what he has been doing as an author and editor for years: pushing the boundaries of intellectual and activist thought on the Left. By insisting that culture be understood strategically, rather than merely employed tactically, Shukaitis has unlocked the secret of an affective and effective artistic activism for our times. Brilliant and useful. -- Stephen Duncombe, New York University; Co-Director, Center for Artistic ActivismI was convinced it was impossible to say something new about politics and the avant-garde, and I really enjoyed being proved wrong in so many different ways. -- David Graeber, Professor of Anthropology, London School of EconomicsStevphen Shukaitis has produced an exposition on the strategic – as opposed to purely tactical – possibilities immanent within the post-war avant-garde that is as beautiful as the chance meeting of Autonomous Marxism and the Situationist International on the dissecting-table of critical theory. -- Gregory Sholette, Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Social Practice at Queens College Art Department, The City University of New YorkCan strategy emerge from out of the diverse, fragmentary and temporary tactics of contemporary social movements? In this important book, which offers telling historical perspectives and is at the same time forged in the practice of political opposition, Stevphen Shukaitis offers a sustained argument that it can, and that it should. -- Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of ArtThis is a really thought provoking book, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to think about art in ways that are thoroughly social, and that try very hard indeed to rescue a radical politics from the global institutions of art capitalism. * Culture Machine *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements / Let’s Take the First Bus Out of Here: A User’s Guide / 1. Introduction: Class Composition and the Avant-Garde / Part I: Territories: Psychogeography / 2. Theories made to die in the war of time / 3. Metropolitan Strategies, Psychogeographic Investigations / Part II: Art/Work Sabotage / 4. Can Creative Practice Break Bricks / 5. Learning Not to Labor / Part III: Institutions: Overidentification / 6. Fascists as Much as Painters / 7. Icons of Futures Past / 8. Coda: The Composition of Movements to Come / Bibliography / Index

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Book SynopsisWe live in a mediatized society, a society one could call a society of images. Working at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, Patrick Vauday challenges the dominant assumptions of this society and its disposition towards images. This challenge does not advocate repudiatingimages altogether, but rather entreats us to see them in a different light. This new way of thinking of images affords a glimpse into what images do and produce, rather than viewing them as copies or mere representations. Images are dynamic agents that are active in our world rather than simply empty reflections of it. Rethinking the concept of the image in this fashion opens up new ways of interpreting and engaging with works of art. This reconsideration of the role of images in society is the starting point for a new politics that considers the multiple and complex efficacies by which images act, circulate and are created.Trade ReviewVauday (philosophy, Université Paris 8, France) has two objectives for the present work: first, to highlight postwar French thought in aesthetics and, second, to examine its connection with contemporary theories of art related to the aesthetic status of images. Images are the primary focus—not images as mere representations or expressions but images as a shaping pragmatic, generating force. Vauday begins by tracing philosophy’s quarrels with the image and the bewitching charm of appearances, from Plato and Descartes to contemporary writers. He offers, by way of contrast, Aristotle, who considered the image as the rationalization of the sensible. This finds its modern extension in phenomenology, in which painting, cinema, and the other visible arts invest in the phenomenal world, enabling one to pass from an ontology of images (what is an image?) to the question of what images do—a pragmatic of images. The author explores concepts ranging from photographic prose, the impurity of cinema, and the image in the mirror of ontology to the politics of pictorial space, contemporary iconoclasm, and the counterimage…. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *A masterful attempt to carve out a space for a consideration of images not bounded by emphases on a singular essence, invariable traits, or an ontological preference toward a pragmatics of images that opens up the possibility of political transformation in terms of heterogeneity, dynamic reconfiguration, and critical intervention. Refusing the either/or logic prevalent in contemporary art theory, the author persuasively shows that, too often, these dominant narratives obscure the heterogeneity of forces and relations amongst artists and artistic practices when confronting new forms, materialities, or media. This is an inspired account of the potentialities of art. -- Janae Sholtz, Association Professor of Philosophy, Alvernia UniversityThe Invention of the Visible is destined to become a masterwork in the study of the contemporary image. The book is rich in examples from the fields of painting, photography and cinema and expertly shows how these artistic practices overlap and intersect. Vauday argues for a post-essentialist view of images, untethered from the classical model of representation, and freed in their creative power to produce practical effects that play with the material forces of their composition. -- Walter Brogan, Villanova UniversityNot only does Patrick Vauday offer a lively and most remarkable introduction to the aesthetics of the image in French contemporary philosophy; he also demonstrates the important role played by the ‘Image Turn’ within this tradition. The Invention of the Visible invites us ‘to unmake and remake images’, enabling us to conceive of configurations of the world other than those of a phenomenology of art with which French philosophy has long been associated. -- Eric Alliez, Professor, Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy, Kingston University and Professor of Aesthetics, ParisTable of ContentsTranslators Preface / 1. Introduction / 2. The Image in the Mirror of Ontology / 3. Aesthetics: What Images Do / 4. Poetics: Making Images / 5. Politics: Unmaking and Remaking Images / 6. Conclusion: Towards a Civilization of Images / Bibliography / Index

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Book SynopsisThis book focuses on the philosophical, artistic, and scientific forces that impacted on the humanist of the late Medieval and Renaissance period, profuse in the exchange of ideas and discovery, behind much of which was the impact of Dante’s Divine Comedy with a message which continues to reverberate through the centuries. What has also persisted is the perpetual tension between science, religion, and design because of their perceived contradictions. The book explores how we might gain inspiration and motivation to embrace a consistent artistry and sense of exploration in the face of an ever-expanding knowledge-based frontier.

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Book SynopsisThis book investigates the scope and significance of Stanley Cavell’s lifelong and lasting contribution to aesthetic understanding. Focusing on various strands of the rich body of Cavell’s philosophical work, the authors explore connections between his wide-ranging writings on literature, music, film, opera, autobiography, Wittgenstein, and Austin to contemporary currents in aesthetic thinking. Most centrally, the writings brought together here from an international team of senior, mid-career, and emerging scholars, explore the illuminating power of Cavell’s work for our deeper and richer comprehension of the intricate relations between aesthetic and ethical understanding. The chapters show what aesthetic understanding consists of, how such understanding might be articulated in the tradition of Cavell following Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and why this mode of human understanding is particularly important. At a time of quickening interest in Cavell and the tradition of which he is a central part and present-day leading exponent, this book offers insight into the deepest contributions of a major American philosopher and the profound role that aesthetic experience can play in the humane understanding of persons, society, and culture. Table of Contents1. Introduction; Garry L. Hagberg.- Part I: Understanding Persons Through Film.- 2. I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown; Francey Russell.- 3. Other Minds and Unknown Women: The Case of Gaslight; Jay R.Elliott.-4. The Melodrama of the Unknown Man; Peter Dula.- Part II: Shakespeare, Opera, and Philosophical Interpretation.-5. Cordelia’s Moral Incapacity in King Lear David Anthony Holiday.- 6. Disowning Certainty: Tragic and Comic Skepticism in Cavell, Montaigne, and Shakespeare; Stan Benfell.-7. Must We Mean What We Sing?: Cosi fan tutte and the Lease of Voice; Ian Ground.- Part III: Aesthetic Understanding and Moral Life.-8. What Matters: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Importance; Sandra Laugier.-9. Achilles’ Tears: Cavell, the Iliad, and Possibilities for the Human; David LaRocca.-10. Wittgenstein “in the midst of” Life, Death, Sanity, Madness - and Mathematics: Cavellian Themes; Richard McDonough.- Part IV: Reading Fiction and Literary Understanding.- 11. Fraudulence, Knowledge, and Post-Imperial Geographies in John Le Carré’s Fiction: A Cavellian Postcolonial Reading; Alan Johnson.- 12. Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith's The Egoist; Erin Greer.- 13. Within the Words of Henry James: Cavell as Austinian Reader; Garry L. Hagberg.- Index

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Book SynopsisThis book provides a critical assessment of Benjamin’s writings on Franz Kafka and of Benjamin’s related writings. Eliciting from Benjamin’s writings a conception of philosophy that is political in its dissociation from – its becoming renegade in relation to, its philosophic shame about – established laws, norms, and forms, the book compares Benjamin’s writings with relevant works by Agamben, Heidegger, Levinas, and others. In relating Benjamin’s writings on Kafka to Benjamin’s writings on politics, the study delineates a philosophic impetus in literature and argues that this impetus has potential political consequences. Finally, the book is critical of Benjamin’s messianism insofar as it is oriented by the anticipated elimination of exceptions and distractions. Exceptions and distractions are, the book argues, precisely what literature, like other arts, brings to the fore. Hence the philosophic, and the political, importance of literature. Table of ContentsIntroduction.PART I. INHUMANLY WISE SHAME.1. Gesture of Philosophy.2. Historico-Philosophic Shame.3. Unmythic Wisdom.4. Foolishness of Philosophy.5. Prophecy of Shame.Part II. ANXIETY AND ATTENTIVENESS.6. Anxiety.7. Study.8. Distractedly Attentive.9. Anxious Friendliness as Physical Attentiveness.PART III POLITICS.10. Exception and Decision.11. In the Epic ‘Vorwelt’.12. Philosophy, Literature, Politics.- Bibliography.-Acknowledgements.Index.

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Book SynopsisThe essays in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture contribute pioneering and revelatory insights into the phenomenon of invisibility, forging new and multi-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of aesthetics, technology, representation and politics. Importantly, they acknowledge the complex interaction between invisibility and its opposite, visibility, arguing that the one cannot be fully grasped without the other. Considering these entanglements across different media forms, the chapters reveal that the invisible affects many cultural domains, from digital communication and operative images to the activism of social movements, as well as to identity, race, gender and class issues. Whether the subject is comic books, photographic provocations, biometric and brainwave sensing technologies, letters, or a cinematic diary, the analyses in this book engage critically and theoretically with the topic of invisibility and thus represent the first scholarly study to identify its importance for the field of visual culture.Table of Contents1. Invisibility Matters, Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes.- 2. Invisible Empire: Learning to Look Askew in the Art of Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen, Henrik Gustafsson.- 3. Literary Device: Invisible Light and a Photo of Photography, Ari Laskin.- 4. Tomas van Houtryve's Packing Heat and the Culture of Surveillance, Øyvind Vågnes.- 5. Neurointerfaces, Mental Imagery and Sensory Translation in Art and Science in the Digital Age, Ksenia Fedorova.- 6. Invisibility and the Ethics of Erasure: Khaled Barakeh’s The Untitled Images, Asbjørn Grønstad.- 7. Neither Visible nor Hidden: The Structuring of the Sensible, Maria-Carolina Cambre.- 8. Reading the Invisible in Marjane Satrapi’s Embroideries, Jena Habegger-Conti.- 9. Hearing and Seeing the In/visible: Anne Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary, Anjo-mari Gouws.- 10. Power in Partial Visibility: Reframing Positions on 19th & Early 20th Century Photography, Lucy L. Bowditch.- 11. Materiality of the Invisible in David Wilson’s “California Letters”, Lene Johannessen.

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Book SynopsisWe face a crisis of public reason. Our quest for a politics that is free, moral and rational has, somehow, made it hard for us to move, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own, and to embrace reality. This book addresses this crisis with a model of public reason based in a new aesthetic reading of Hannah Arendt’s political theory. It begins by telling the story of Arendt’s engagement with the Augenblicke of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka and Benjamin, in order to identify her own aesthetic Moment. Josefson then explicates this Moment, what he calls the freedom of the beautiful, as a third face of freedom on par with Arendt’s familiar freedoms of action and the life of the mind. He shows how this freedom, rooted in Jaspers’s phenomenology and a non-metaphysical reading of Kant, serves to redress the world-alienation that was a uniting theme across Arendt’s works. Ultimately, this volume aims to challenge orthodox accounts of Arendtian politics, presenting Arendt’s aesthetic politics as a radically new model of republicanism and as an alternative to political liberal, deliberative and agonistic models of public reason. Table of Contents1. Introduction.- 2. The Moment.- 3. The Beautiful.- 4. Judgment.- 5. Spirit.- 6. Res publica.- 7. Conversations.

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Book SynopsisThis book explores the concept of the end of literature through the lens of Hegel's philosophy of art. In his version of Hegel's 'end of art' thesis, Arthur Danto claimed that contemporary art has abandoned its distinctive sensitive and emotive features to become increasingly reflective. Contemporary art has become a question of philosophical reflection on itself and on the world, thus producing an epochal change in art history. The core idea of this book is that this thesis applies quite well to all forms of art except one, namely literature: literature resists its 'end'.Unlike other arts, which have experienced significant fractures in the contemporary world, Campana proposes that literature has always known how to renew itself in order to retain its distinguishing features, so much so that in a way it has always come to terms with its own end. Analysing the distinct character of literature, this book proposes a new and original interpretation of the 'end of art' thesis, showing how it can be used as a key conceptual framework to understand the contemporary novel. Table of ContentsChapter 1: The End of Art and the Resistance of Literature.- Chapter 2: Literature and the Other Arts.- Chapter 3: The End of Literature.- Chapter 4: Philosophisation and Ordinariness.- Chapter 5: The Contemporary Novel after the End of Literature.- Chapter 6: Conclusions.-

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Book SynopsisThis book presents an original worldview, Homo risibilis, wherein self-referential humor is proposed as the path leading from a tragic view of life to a liberating embrace of human ridicule. Humor is presented as a conceptual tool for holding together contradictions and managing the unresolvable conflict of the human condition till Homo risibilis resolves the inherent tension without epistemological cost. This original approach to the human condition allows us to effectively address life’s ambiguities without losing sight of its tragic overtones and brings along far-ranging personal and social benefits.By defining the problem that other philosophies and many religions attempt to solve in terms we can all relate to, Homo risibilis enables an understanding of the Other that surpasses mere tolerance. Its egalitarian vision roots an ethic of compassion without requiring metaphysical or religious assumptions and liberates the individual for action on others’ behalf. It offers a new model of rationality which effectively handles and eventually resolves the tension between oneself, others, and the world at large. Amir’s view of the human condition transcends the field of philosophy of humor. An original worldview that fits the requirements of traditional philosophy, Homo risibilis is especially apt to answer contemporary concerns. It embodies the minimal consensus we need in order to live together and the active role philosophy should responsibly play in a global world. Here developed for the first time in a complete way, the Homo risibilis worldview is not only liberating in nature, but also illuminates the shortcomings of other philosophies in their attempts to secure harmony in a disharmonious world for a disharmonious human being.Trade Review“There is plenty of material here for philosophers given its provocative claims but also in its mine of quotes and diligent footnoting. At the same time, the argument is not weighed down by jargon and there should be value for some readers outside philosophy. ... the book conveys an intellectual energy that could stimulate a rewarding exploration of ideas.” (Mark Weeks, European Journal of Humour Research, Vol. 9 (4), 2021)Table of Contents1. The Human Predicament.- 2. To Solve or Nor to Solve....- 3. Handling Contradictions.- 4. Revisiting Philosophic Ideals.- 5. Homo risibilis: The Ridiculous Human Being.- 6. The Good Life I: Joy, Happiness, Timelessness.- 7. The Good Life II: Compassion, Skepticism, Lucidity.

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Book SynopsisThis collection engages the work of Michael Oakeshott predominantly on the themes of his skepticism, politics, and aesthetics. An international set of authors engages and expands the analysis of Oakeshott’s writings in often neglected areas and topics and in ways that brings Oakeshott into conversation with a surprisingly diverse set of thinkers.Table of Contents1. Introduction. 2. Under the Law of Ruin: Practice, Aesthetics, and the Civil Association.3. Michael Oakeshott Philosopher of Skepticism: Conservative or Liberal?.4. Out of Rationalist Politics’ Crises: Popper and Oakeshott.5. A Conservative Landscape: From A Guide to the Classics to the “Claims of Politics”.6. The Art of the Scholar: Oakeshott’s Conservative Account of Liberal Learning.7. The Understanding of Rationalism in C.S. Lewis and Michael Oakeshott: Tradition, Experience, and the Reading of Old Books.8. Oakeshott, Strauss and the Romans.9. Authority: Fragments of the Good Regime.10. ‘That spirit of quiet’: Oakeshott, Keats and Sontag Towards a Philosophy of Silence.11. Oakeshott’s Theory of Poetry: A Corrective from Seamus Heaney.12. The Problem of a Pure Theory of Poetry.13. What can Contemporary Realists Learn from Montaigne? On the Significance of the Author of the Essais for Michael Oakeshott and Raymond Geuss

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Book SynopsisWhen we think of Iris Murdoch’s relationship with art forms, the visual arts come most readily to mind. However, music and other sounds are equally important. Soundscapes – music and other types of sound – contribute to the richly textured atmosphere and moral tenor of Murdoch’s novels. This book will help readers to appreciate anew the sensuous nature of Iris Murdoch’s prose, and to listen for all kinds of music, sounds and silences in her novels, opening up a new sub-field in Murdoch studies in line with the emerging field of Word and Music Studies. This study is supported by close readings of selected novels exemplifying the subtle variety of ways she deploys music, sounds and silence in her fiction. It also covers Murdoch’s knowledge of music and her allusions to music throughout her work, and includes a survey of musical settings of her words by various composers.Trade Review“This book is also a rare example of appendices being as fascinating and as impressive as the main text. … Both scholarly and entertaining, it will be accessible to a general reader, although it is most likely to be of interest to those already reasonably familiar with Murdoch’s fiction who will surely find they hear things in the novels which they have never heard before.” (Janfarie Skinner, Iris Murdoch Review, 2022)Table of Contents1. Chapter 1 Listening to Iris Murdoch.Introduction.Music and sound in fiction: a review of the field.Music in Murdoch’s life.Discussions of music in Murdoch’s philosophy.The sound-worlds in Murdoch’s fiction.Part I – Music.2. Chapter 2 ‘The music is too painful’: Music as character and atmosphere.Introduction.‘Awaken, my blackbird’: Music in The unicorn.‘Like a breathless enchanted girl’: Music in The red and the green.The swan princess: Music in The time of the angels.‘The concourse of sweet sounds’: Music in The nice and the good.Conclusion.3. Chapter 3 ‘The point at which flesh and spirit most joyfully meet’: Singers and singing.Introduction.‘Che cosa e amor?’: Singing in The sea, the sea.Singing as exclusion in The message to the planet.‘Never to sing again? Never?’: Singing in The philosopher’s pupil (1983).Conclusion.4. Chapter 4 Musical women and unmusical men.Introduction: ‘Of course they never let the women sing.’.Quiet women: The good apprentice.Silent pianos.No women composers.Opera, intimacy, sexuality and androgyny in A fairly honourable defeat.Conclusion.Part II – Silence and sound.5. Chapter 5 ‘Different voices, different discourses’: Voices and other human sounds.Introduction: Serious noticing.‘The long search for words’: Something special.‘The quiet sound of voices’: The sandcastle.‘Intolerable with menace’: Henry and Cato.‘A mechanical litany’: The good apprentice.Conclusion.6. Chapter 6 ‘Like a clarity under a mist’: Ambient noise and silence, dreamscapes and atmosphere.Introduction.The sacred and profane love machine: The drama of silence.The black prince and Under the net: Silence and art.Bruno’s dream: Synaesthesia and perception.Nuns and soldiers.Conclusion.Part III – Settings.7. Chapter 7 ‘Just bring me the composers’: Musical settings of Iris Murdoch’s words.Introduction.The servants – opera: music by William Mathias, libretto by Iris Murdoch.The round horizon, cantata in five parts: music by Christopher Bochmann, words by Iris Murdoch.The one alone: Radio play with music by Gary Carpenter.A year of birds: Song cycle for soprano and orchestra by Malcolm Williamson.Forgive me. In memoriam Iris Murdoch, 1919-1999, for unaccompanied vocal ensemble (SATB) by Paul Crabtree.Inspired by Iris: Paul Hullah and Kent Wennman.Paul Hullah, All the names under the sun and Home.Kent Wennman, A Jerusalem conversation and The thinker and the feeling one.Conclusion: Iris Murdoch set to music.Coda Sound, music, silence and listening.Part IV – The music.Appendix 1 Music mentioned in Murdoch’s fiction.Classical composers.Vocal music.Chronological list of music mentioned in Murdoch’s fiction.Appendix 2 Items in Iris Murdoch’s Oxford music collection held at Kingston University Library.Iris Murdoch’s manuscript notebooks of songs.Anthologies, collections, scores etc.Single works.

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Book SynopsisThe book explores the liminal aesthetics of U.S. cultural and literary practice. Interrogating the notion of a presumptive unity of the American experience, Moveable Designs argues that inner conflict, divisiveness, and contradiction are integral to the nation’s cultural designs, themes, and motifs. The study suggests that U.S. literary and cultural practice is permeated by ‘moveable designs’—flexible, yet constant features of hegemonial practice that constitute an integral element of American national self-fashioning. The naturally pervasive liminality of U.S. cultural production is the key to understanding the resilience of American culture. Moveable Designs looks at artistic expressions across various media types (literature, paintings, film, television), seeking to illuminate critical phases of U.S. American literature and culture—from the revolutionary years to the movements of romanticism, realism, and modernism, up to the postmodern era. It combines a wide array of approaches, from cultural history and social anthropology to phenomenology. Connecting an analysis of literary and cultural texts with approaches from design theory, the book proposes a new way of understanding American culture as design. It is one of the unique characteristics of American culture that it creates—or, rather, designs—potency out of its inner conflicts and apparent disunities. That which we describe as an identifiable ‘American identity’ is actually the product of highly vulnerable, alternating processes of dissolution and self-affirmation. Table of Contents1 Introduction: Welcome to the Twilight Zone.Moveable Fictions—Cultural (Dis)Unity and Boundary Transgression. The Designs of Literary and Cultural Practice. Design Thinking and the Cultural Field of ‘America’. The Longue Durée of Moveable Designs in American Cultural History. Part I Theoretical Framework. 2 Moveable Designs: Liminal Aesthetics and Cultural Production. Designing Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. America as Fiction—Literature as Performance. Liminal Aesthetics and Liquid Modernity. Culture as Design—The (Not So) Secret Lives of Aesthetic Objects. Part II Contexts. 3 TransAmerica: Cultural Hybridity and Transgendered Desire from the Colonial Era to Modernity. Introduction: Heterogeneity and Transgendered Desire. The Making of ‘America’: From the Colonial Era to the Nation State. Revolutionary Compacts: Transgendered Imagery and the Invention of ‘Columbia’. Conclusion: From Transnational America to Transnation. 4 The ‘American in Chains’: (Cons)Piracy and the Specter of North Africa in U.S. Barbary Captivity Narratives. Introduction: North Africa in the Early U.S. Cultural Imagination. The Specter of Algiers in Barbary Captivity Narratives. Algiers as a Counter-Image to the Early U.S. Republic in The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania. Spaces of Imperialism in Slaves in Algiers and The Algerine Captive. Conclusion: U.S. Exceptionalism and the Birth of the Orient as America’s Other. 5 Open Doors, Closed Spaces: The Transatlantic Imaginary in American Urban Writing from the Post-Revolutionary Era to Modernism. Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Cross-Atlantic Mapmaking. From Open City to Shrinking City. The Labyrinthine Aesthetics of the Walking City. Open Doors and Walled Streets: Atlantic Cities as Imagined Landscapes. Conclusion: Shades of the Open City in U.S. Transatlantic Writing. Part III Case Studies. 6 White Bo(d)y in Wonderland: Cultural Alterity and Sexual Desire in Tod Browning’s Where East Is East (1929). Introduction: Essentialist Topographies—Where East Is East, and West Is West. The Codes of Colonial Discourse. Economies of Stereotyping. Metonymic Displacement and Ethnic Masquerade. Metaphysical Condensation and Animal Imagery. Fetishization of the Orient. Allegories of (De-)Historicization. Comic Ethnicity and Explosive Body Language. Conclusion: The Uses and Abuses of Orientalist Imagery. 7 Cinematic Literature: Intermedial Aesthetics, Juvenile Rebellion, and Carnal Subjectivity in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Introduction: J.D. Salinger—An Undercover Story. The Catcher in the Rye as a Cinematic Text. Juvenile Rebellion and the Rhetoric of Disgust. Conclusion: Carnal Identification and Cinematic Fiction. 8 Animal Laughter: Carnivalesque Humor and the Aesthetics of Dehierarchization in Mister Ed. Introduction: The Sitcom Genre and Carnivalesque Humor. Rendering the ‘Impossible’ Possible: Postcolonial Theory and the Animal Subaltern. Bestial Ambivalence and the Aesthetics of Shapeshifting. Pushing the Boundaries of Human and Non-human: Mister Ed as a Liminal Animal Denizen. Conclusion: Empowering the Subjugated Other. Part IV State of Affairs and Outlook. 9 Astronautic Subjectivity: Postmodern Culture and the Embodiment of Space in American Science Fiction. Introduction: Fashioning the Astronautic Subject. Postmodern Subjectivity and the Body Without Organs. The Gender of Astronauts. Man as Mother, Or, Gender Trouble in Space. The Astronautic Subject as Cultural Figuration. Transsexual Galaxies: The Mechanics of Engenderneering. Conclusion: Burning Bridges, Engendering New Selves. 10 Coda: Thinking ‘America’ in the Age of the Liminal. Works Cited and Consulted.

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Book SynopsisExplores the relationship between Hannah Arendt's thought and theology. This volume is a manifold approach to a less evident and much-neglected undercurrent in the work of Hannah Arendt, namely her ambiguous relation to the Judeo-Christian religious heritage. It contains discussions about strictly theological motives-like salvation or original sin-but it also explores topics such as forgiveness, love, natality, and the world within the religious aura.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Editorial Note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Faith in the World or: The Philosophical Contraband of a Hidden Spiritual Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 An Introduction by Rafael Zawisza and Ludger Hagedorn Part I: Two Faces of Earthly Love Traces and Transitions to Hannah Arendt's Unwritten Book on Love . . 37 Sigrid Weigel Amor Mundi: The Marrano Background of Hannah Arendt's Love for the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Agata Bielik-Robson Part II: Encounters With Theology Between Adamite Dreams and Original Sin: Hannah Arendt's Cryptic Heterodoxy? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Rafael Zawisza Hannah Arendt's Debt to Rudolf Bultmann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Jim Josefson Part III: Final Destination Secularity Hannah Arendt and Michael Walzer on the Exodus: Politics in the Hebrew Bible? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Martine Leibovici The Promise Inherent in Natality: Performance and Invocation . . . . . . . 151 Christina Schues Part IV: Politics Without the Absolute Actions That Deserve to Be Remembered: Transcendence and Immortality in a Secular World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Roger Berkowitz Absolute Goodness, the Banality of Evil, and the Wickedness Beyond Vice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189 Milan Hanys A Jurisprudence of Neglect: Arendt, Ambedkar, and the Logic of Political Cruelty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Aishwary Kumar Epilogue: Abraham's Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Vivian Liska Biographical Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

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Book Synopsis“There is no greater gift to man than to understand nothing of his fate”, declares poet-philosopher Paul Valery. And yet the searching human being seeks ceaselessly to disentangle the networks of experiences, desires, inward promptings, personal ambitions, and elevated strivings which directed his/her life-course within changing circumstances in order to discover his sense of life. Literature seeks in numerous channels of insight the dominant threads of “the sense of life”, “the inward quest”, “the frames of experience” in reaching the inward sources of what we call ‘destiny’ inspired by experience and temporality which carry it on. This unusual collection reveals the deeper generative elements which form sense of life stretching between destiny and doom. They escape attention in their metamorphic transformations of the inexorable, irreversibility of time which undergoes different interpretations in the phases examining our life. Our key to life has to be ever discovered anew.Table of ContentsINAUGURAL ADDRESS: Anna-Teresa TymienieckaSECTION I: THE SENSE OF LIFEPRESENT ETERNITY: QUESTS OF TEMPORALITY IN THE LITERARY PRODUCTION OF THE <> IN FRANCE (THE WRITINGS OF DOMINIQUE FOURCADE AND EMMANUEL HOCQUARD)Silvia RivaA SENSE OF LIFE IN LANGUAGE LOVE AND LITERATURELawrence KimmelTHE GARDEN THEN AND NOW; SENSE OF LIFE – CONTEMPORARY AND IN GENESISBernadette ProchaskaTHE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY AS THE FIRST UNIQUELY AMERICAN EXPRESSION OF PHENOMENOLOGY IN WILLIAM JAMES AND HIS SWEDENBORGIAN AND TRANSCENDENTALIST MILIEUEugene TaylorSECTION II: THE INWARD QUESTTHE EVOLUTION OF JUSTICE IN THE ORESTEIAHeidi SilcoxA DOUBLE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SENSE OF THE HYBRID OF FATE AND DESTINY IN COMMUNITY IN ACHEBE’S ARROW AND HEAD’S TREASURESImafedia OkhamafeWHAT MASIE KNEW IN WHAT MASIE KNEWVictor Gerald RivasSTYLE MATTERS: THE LIFE-WORLDS OF ANCIENT LITERATUREDamian StockingJAMES JOYCE’S IVY DAY IN THE COMMITTEE ROOM AND THE FIVE CODES OF FICTIONRaymond WilsonSECTION III: HISTORICITY AND LIFETEMPORALITY IN FITZGERALD’S BABYLON REVISITEDBernadette ProchaskaON THE METAPHYSICAL BRUTISHNESS OF LIFE IN THE LIGHT OF ZOLA’S THE HUMAN BEASTVictor G. Rivas“MAIS PERSONNE NE PARAISSAIT COMPRENDRE” (“BUT NO ONE SEEMED TO UNDERSTAND”): ATHEISM, NIHILISM, AND HERMENEUTICS IN ALBERT CAMUS’ L’ETRANGER / THE STRANGERGeorge HeffernanHISTORICAL DISTORTIONS AND LITERARY DISCLOSURES IN D.M. THOMAS’S THE WHITE HOTELLewis LivesayMORAL SHAPES OF TIME IN HENRY JAMESMeili SteeleSECTION IV: THE LIMITS OF ORDINARY EXPERIENCE“THE LIMITS OF ORDINARY EXPERIENCE”: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL READING OF RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTERR. Kenneth KirbyGOING BEYOND THE SELF AS THE KNOWLEDGE OF ONESELF AND THE SENSE OF THE UNIVERSEBronislaw BombalaTHE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS: EPIPHANY AND SOCIAL COMMUNION IN PAUL THEROUX’S TRAVEL WRITINGBruce RossEMERSON AFFINITIES: READING RICHARD FORD THROUGH STANLEY CAVELLLawrence F. RhuFAULKNER’S THE SOUND AND THE FURY AS ANTI-ENTROPIC NOVELJerre Collins SECTION V: DESTINY, EXPERIENCE AND TIMEW.B. YEATS, UNITY OF CULTURE, AND THE SPIRITUAL TELOS OF IRELANDR. Kenneth KirbyDOOM, DESTINY, AND GRACE: THE PRODIGAL SON IN MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S HOMERebecca M. PainterMAN’S DESTINY IN TISCHNER’S PHILOSOPHY OF DRAMALeszek PyraTHE SOURCE FORM, AND GOAL OF ART IN ANTON CHEKHOV’S THE SEA GULLRaymond J. Wilson, IIISECTION VI: THE ARTISTIC QUEST VERSUS THE DISCERNMENT OF TRUTH A SHORT STUDY OF THE JAPANESE RENGA: THE TRANS-SUBJECTIVE CREATION OF POETIC ATMOSPHERE: Tadashi OgawaALTERED STATES: THE ARTISTIC QUEST IN THE STONE FLOWER AND LA SYLPHIDEBruce RossTOO MUCH HAPPINESS, TOO MUCH SUFFERING… NEVER ENOUGH REALITY TRANSFORMED BY NARRATIVERebecca PainterTHE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MERLEAU-PONTY AND LITERARY ARTSPiotr MrozREVISITING STEINBECK’S LITTORAL PHENOMENOLOGY: HUSSERLIAN ELEMENTS IN THE LOG FROM THE ‘SEA OF CORTEZ’Gretchen GusichTHE ROLE OF ART IN CAMUS AND SARTREJoanna Handerek STAGING HEIDEGGER: CORPOREAL PHILOSOPHY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND THE THEATERThomas BlakeINDEX OF NAMESPROGRAMS FROM THE 2009 AND 2010 PHENOMENOLOGY AND LITERATURE CONFERENCES

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Book SynopsisWhat does mathematics have to do with poetry? Seemingly, nothing. Mathematics deals with abstractions while poetry with emotions. And yet, the two share something essential: Beauty. “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” says the title of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.A winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2015, “Mathematics, Poetry and Beauty” tries to solve the secret of the similarity between the two domains. It tries to explain how a mathematical argument and a poem can move us in the same way. Mathematical and poetic techniques are compared, with the aim of showing how they evoke the same sense of beauty.The reader may find that, as Bertrand Russell said, “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty hold and austere, like that of sculpture … sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.”Table of ContentsThe Magic of Poetry and of Mathematics; Condensation; Order; How Mathematicians and Poets Think; Poetic Image; Mathematical Image; Paradoxes and Oxymorons; Self Reference and Godel's Theorem;

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Book SynopsisNatural Beauty was selected for the Choice Outstanding Academic Title list for 2008!Natural Beauty presents a bold new philosophical account of the principles involved in making aesthetic judgments about natural objects. It surveys historical and modern accounts of natural beauty and weaves elements derived from those accounts into a “syncretic theory” that centers on key features of aesthetic experience—specifically, features that sustain and reward attention. In this way, Moore’s theory sets itself apart from both the purely cognitive and the purely emotive approaches that have dominated natural aesthetics until now. Natural Beauty shows why aesthetic appreciation of works of art and aesthetic appreciation of nature can be mutually reinforcing; that is, how they are cooperative rather than rival enterprises. Moore also makes a compelling case for how and why the experience of natural beauty can contribute to the larger project of living a good life.Trade Review“In 1992 Mothersill believed that philosophers had not yet done their best work on beauty. … Ronald Moore has answered Mothersill’s challenge with a book that draws its central ideas from the history of philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle through Hume and Kant, to John Dewey and Monroe Beardsley. Moore has engaged in conversation nearly every major Western philosopher on beauty in the writing of his book. The result is a tour de force on beauty that captures the best of the canon and thrusts research on the subject in a new direction. Natural Beauty: A Theory of Aesthetics Beyond the Arts may be the most important book on beauty since Kant, The Critique of Judgment.” — Dan Vaillancourt, Loyola University Chicago in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 66, Number 3, Summer 2008, pages 303-305“Written in clear and elegant prose, this book is a welcome contribution to debates about beauty wherever we find it. Moore provides a refreshing reminder of what aesthetics can accomplish when it takes seriously both its history and the uniqueness of aesthetic experience.” — Jonathan Maskit, Denison University“Natural Beauty is a well-balanced, wonderfully written, systematic and thoroughly researched book. Moore’s positive theory is so well developed and original that this book should immediately become one of the most important books in nature aesthetics. And because it takes aim at the basic concepts of aesthetic judgment, aesthetic experience and aesthetic value, it will also have an impact on the wider field of aesthetics. A genuinely impressive performance.” — John Andrew Fisher, University of Colorado, Boulder“In this wonderfully written book Ronald Moore provides a rigorous and historically informed syncretic account of environmental aesthetics that may free us from having to choose between scientific and emotive accounts of natural beauty. I cannot wait for the debates which will follow this engaging contribution.” — Andrew Light, Editor, Ethics, Place, and Environment “Ron Moore’s rich and subtle defense of a syncretic aesthetics of nature advances the philosophical conversation about natural beauty while empowering ordinary appreciators to more confidently delight in nature and art.” — Stephanie Ross, University of Missouri St. Louis“Moore has written a truly impressive book on the very compelling subject of natural beauty. He surveys the most prominent views on the subject and draws a line that both sythesizes and advances their competing claims. In Moore’s view, one’s appreciation of the beauty in artifacts informs an appreciation of the beauty in nature and vice versa. It is all good, as is this clearly written, cogently argued, well informed, informative book.” — J.M. Carvalho, Villanova University — in ChoiceTable of ContentsPrefaceIntroductionChapter 1: Appreciating Nature as NaturalThe Problem of AppreciationGlass FlowersWarhol and BlaschkaChapter 2: Conceptualism and Non-conceptualismConceptualism and Its ProblemsNon-conceptualism and Its ProblemsSyncretic AestheticsChapter 3: The Historical Roots of Syncretism: Early DevelopmentsAncient ViewsMedieval and Renaissance ViewsEarly Modern DevelopmentsChapter 4: The Historical Roots of Syncretism: Modern DevelopmentsKant and the Subjective TurnSchopenhauer and the Aesthetic AttitudeRecent Aesthetic Experience TheoryCritical Responses to This TheoryWhere This Leaves UsChapter 5: Aesthetic Experience RevisitedCold PlumsHunkered-down Aesthetic ExperienceGrains of SandChapter 6: The Framing ParadoxNature UnframedNature FramedThe Paradox and Its ResolutionChapter 7: Syncretic Regard—Part I Judges and “True Judges”The NatureworldFundamental Elements in Judgments of Natural Beauty Selective Sensory FocusCompleteness Within LimitsSavoringLetting Nature Be Nature Typal and General Judgment Chapter 8: Syncretic Regard—Part II General Factors Intensive BeautyFormal BeautyFormal Beauty and FormalismConnective BeautyElaborative Imagination Art and Nature Reciprocity: Learning from Each OtherInhibition: Getting in Each Other’s Way Chapter 9: Patterns of Appreciation and Aesthetic DevelopmentCarlson’s InventoryThe Place of Syncretic TheoryGrowing Up AestheticallyChapter 10: Theoretical Implications and ConclusionLayers of ResponseHard QuestionsConclusionReferencesIndex

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.We think we know the trench coat, but where does it come from and where will it take us? From its origins in the trenches of WW1, this military outerwear came to project the inner-being of detectives, writers, reporters, rebels, artists and intellectuals. The coat outfitted imaginative leaps into the unknown. Trench Coat tells the story of seductive entanglements with technology, time, law, politics, trust and trespass. Readers follow the rise of a sartorial archetype through media, design, literature, cinema and fashion. Today, as a staple in stories of future life-worlds, the trench coat warns of disturbances to come.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewTrench Coat maps the extraordinary lives of this seemingly simple garment, which emerged from early industrialized warfare to become the screen for a multitude of projected dreams, fears and desires across the 20th century to the present. Jane Tynan’s material and cultural history charts the evolution of a coat that is practical yet cryptic, hyper-visible but concealing, possessed of vitality whilst also a form of camouflage. * Rachel Woodward, Professor of Human Geography, Newcastle University, UK *Jane Tynan’s Trench Coat is a delight – richly informative and written in prose as stylish as the object it describes. Uncovering the ‘dark and dangerous energy’ behind this icon of modernity, Tynan vividly captures the trench coat’s perennial appeal. * Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster University, UK, and author of Fashioning Gothic Bodies *Really interesting. . . . There's so many iconic moments that this analysis helps us peer more closely into. * New Books Network *Another engaging, thought-provoking paperback in Bloomsbury's excellent 'Object Lessons' series. * The Irish Scene *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Substance 2. War 3. Mobility 4. Insurgency 5. Reportage 6. Heroes or Villains 7. Outsiders 8. Style Conclusion Postscript Notes Index

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Book SynopsisTrade Review“As hard to pigeonhole as Taylor’s prolific and wide-ranging career, Seeing Silence is not exactly philosophy, or spiritual autobiography, or art theory. It is a textual antechamber leading into—or perhaps a frame surrounding—the sculpture in which the life-work of the philosopher-turned-artist lies exposed . . . Taylor leads us on a pilgrimage of revelatory encounters. . . Taylor combines the conceptual, perceptual, and affective with the concretely historical and factual, while offering something more than, and irreducible to, these aspects: a sense for the work as a moment, in each case unique, of silence becoming visible, and visible growing silent.” -- Anthony Curtis Adler * Los Angeles Review of Books *"A glowing melange of philosophy, theology, and art criticism." -- Daniel Schwartz * On the Seawall *“Based on the synesthesia between seeing and hearing, Seeing Silence is an original and fascinating meditation on the origins of human experience, art, and language. Taylor argues eloquently for the significance of silence in the contemporary world, and he shows the value of reflecting on the work of artists and thinkers who have recognized this.” -- Graham Parkes, University of Vienna“When we see silence we see the world without us. Yet Seeing Silence is not simply a book about death; it is also an invitation to rethink visual art as ‘words of silence.’ Taylor conducts us through a noiseless landscape, at once frightening and beautiful, in which Kierkegaard, Jabès, and Bergman, among so many others, are companions for the journey. Artists will delight in this new book as much as scholars will benefit from it.” -- Kevin Hart, University of Virginia“Taylor turns the cacophony of our environment, actual and virtual, toward redemptive moments of silence, all the more rich in implication for how rare they have become. Alongside deep learning in literature, philosophy, and theology, fresh attention to nonverbal cognates in architecture, painting, and sculpture carry the reader to unanticipated recognitions. From each nested instance to the next, intimations of the infinite, not to say the divine, emerge in the undisclosed, the unsayable, and the unsounded.” -- Thomas Crow, New York University“Seeing Silence succeeds wonderfully. . . . Taylor’s case starts with the claim that seeing silence grants access to reality. This makes it something of a countercultural practice in noisy times like ours when reality is presented in unlimited streaming information, ongoing notifications, and always-available chatrooms. Taylor’s book stands apart for the originality of his vision, the particularity of his thesis, and, notably, the canon of authors and artists on which he draws.” -- Jeffrey L. Kosky, Washington and Lee University“Seeing Silence begins in medias res, in the way of an intellectual history, the narrative epic of a memoirist. What happens when there is no time outside of us, when we do not exist in time? Said another way, the book begins and finishes, but has no Origin and End, as both are swathed by an encompassing Silence that somehow manages to speak. Here Taylor is at his most admirable originality. . . . This book will be of great importance to academic specialists in philosophy of religion, theology, aesthetics, and other arts. But it is so charmingly written that it should appeal as well to the ‘public intellectual,’ and to all humanistically competent readers.” -- Ray L. Hart, Boston University“Seeing Silence is indeed a book on the presence of God in art, silence being only one of the keys to understanding this presence. But going further, Seeing Silence proposes a comprehensive theology of art that uses silence to speak the name of God. . . . The book is less concerned with investigating silence as art or silence as an element in a work of art, but rather the question of what art–and the image in particular–can do to approach the elusive concept of silence.” -- Vincent Debiais * Arts et Intelligences du Silence (Translated from French) *"Readers interested in philosophical aesthetics, life writing, Continental hermeneutics, and negative or apophatic theology will find much to enjoy and ponder in Seeing Silence. Simply put, Seeing Silence is an innovative, enlightening, personal work that rewards careful reading and deep appreciation." * Reading Religion *Table of Contents0. 1. Without 2. Before 3. From 4. 5. Beyond 6. Against 7. Within 8. 9. Between 10. Toward 11. Around 12. 13. With 14. In Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisPresented in a new edition with expanded notes, this genre-defying meditation on the semiotics of late-1920s Weimar culture, composed of 60 short prose pieces that vary wildly in style and theme, offers a fresh opportunity to encounter Walter Benjamin at his most virtuosic and experimental, writing in a vein that anticipates later masterpieces.Trade ReviewThe prose in One-Way Street is positively electrified by the historical moment…Far more important than any residues of past literature, however prevalent, are the ways in which One-Way Street ushers in a wholly original literary aesthetics. Its formal daring is unmatched by any of Benjamin’s earlier work…One-Way Street is dead set on a new mode of materialism, one that shares with Surrealism an esteem for everyday objects, debris, junk, and dross—for whatever is marginal, marginalized, outmoded, or fleeting. This edition’s index testifies to the dizzying thematic diversity of Benjamin’s undertaking: children’s toys, capital punishment, money, mobs, utopia, fancy goods, misery, souvenirs, beggars, and red neon advertising signs reflected in pools of dirty rain. Form in One-Way Street is no mere envelope, but the very arena in which these objects and phenomena clash and generate their sparks. Benjamin’s aphorisms mimic the rhythms of the street, instantiating the experiences most proper to it: distraction, reverie, shock, haste, detour, etc. Scathing critique is mixed with imagistic commentary and surrealistic prose poetry—all broken into shards and scattered like a mosaic of fragments. But however atomized and heterogeneous, the little pieces of One-Way Street pursue a common goal: an idiosyncratic exposé on history (specifically, the disintegration of culture) as deciphered in the most concrete of its artifacts and rituals. -- Michael Blum * Los Angeles Review of Books *One-Way Street is Benjamin’s most daring and experimental book; though short, it contains a wide range of genres ranging from aphorisms and political satire to maxims and instructions. -- Carolin Duttlinger * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"A Seminary Co-Op Notable Book of the Year""[Cohen] makes the case that talking to others—sharing our stories—is how we learn things and sharpen our belief systems, how we piece together what it means to be funny or empathetic. Conversation can change our minds while sustaining our souls."---Hua Hsu, New Yorker"[Cohen] explores what makes for a vivacious meeting of minds. . . . She prizes conversation as an end in itself, its value residing not in the achievement of any particular outcome but in the pleasure of fluent verbal interchange."---Charlie Tyson, The Atlantic"The chief value of this book is its abiding reminder of the pleasure of good talk. . . . It’s a lesson in how conversation can reveal our truest, fullest selves."---Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal"Talking Cure is a thought-provoking read. Cohen skillfully leads the reader through a lively and adventurous exploration of conversation in a wide variety of settings and situations." * Choice Reviews *"Like an agile museum guide, Cohen ushers us through a series of literary and historical exhibitions, not as a lecturer but as a conversation partner in prose. That is, Cohen artfully gives us a book that is itself a conversation about conversation in which the learned and the conversible are reunited. . . . Talking Cure is a beautifully expressed reminder of the joys, perils, and aspirations of conversation and its civilizing power."---Todd Breyfogle, Law & Liberty

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Book SynopsisTrade Review"As Hyde eloquently demonstrates in a compelling trajectory that arcs from Stonehenge to modern London, ugliness is more than a physical trait or quality assigned to an object. It has acted as a site and catalyst for debate on broader social circumstances."---Catherine Slessor, The Guardian"This book is a welcome break from good taste. . . . If you have ever wondered why a certain building seems ugly, this book will help you understand why you feel that way."---Lucy Watson, Financial Times"Hyde’s book confronts ugliness head on, using it as a way to interrogate British architectural discourse. . . . [His] research on the individual case studies is impeccable."---Richard J. Williams, Times Higher Education"The great achievement of this book is to show that, even if the language and opinions about taste change, debates about architecture have always had some common features. They are never just about buildings."---William Whyte, Church Times"Discussions such as those effectively summarised in Ugliness and Judgement are so instructive when we evaluate how to apply concepts of beauty and ugliness in architectural debates."---Alexander Adams, Salisbury Review"A fascinating book. In taking as a point of departure the limitations of aesthetics, Hyde invites readers to understand the assessment of aesthetic failure as a wedge that pries open conversations about inadequate, unresolved, or unsatisfying social and legal arrangements. Ugliness, in his telling, points to gaps in social, regulatory, urban, and institutional fabrics. The author implies that the value of listening to complaints about buildings lies in discerning the issues that encounters with 'ugly' buildings bring to the fore."---Kathryn O’Rourke, Rice Design Alliance"To call out ugliness, then, is a call to arms. While beauty basks lazily and uselessly in its own perfection, ugliness spurs us into action."---Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Spectator

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Book SynopsisJacques Rancière's work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics?

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE JUDY TSOU CRITICAL RACE STUDIES AWARD!In this profoundly innovative book, Ashon T. Crawley engages a wide range of critical paradigms from black studies, queer theory, and sound studies to theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies to theorize the ways in which alternative or otherwise modes of existence can serve as disruptions against the marginalization of and violence against minoritarian lifeworlds and possibilities for flourishing.Examining the whooping, shouting, noise-making, and speaking in tongues of Black Pentecostalisma multi-racial, multi-class, multi-national Christian sect with one strand of its modern genesis in 1906 Los AngelesBlackpentecostal Breath reveals how these aesthetic practices allow for the emergence of alternative modes of social organization. As Crawley deftly reveals, these choreographic, sonic, and visual practices and the sensual experiences they create are not only important for imagining what CTrade Review"Blackpentecostal Breath is a work of utter originality anchored by daring synthesis, acrobatic leaps of imagination, and laced throughout with passages of jolting beauty." -- -Ann Pellegrini coauthor of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance "A one-of-a-kind intervention into performance, religious, black and cultural studies." -- -Roderick A. Ferguson Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique "Crawley's prose is attentive, loving. It's round and sweet. It's generous in associations. Anecdotes and personal emails populate the book...In Blackpentecostal Breath, tales and anecdotes equip us with tools to decode the book;s argument while also allowing us to pause and breathe...Blackpentecostal Breath is a book of its time, but it's decidedly future-oriented. Breathing, after all, is sequential: each breath, however strained, carries the hope of another one, and another one." -- Jean-Thomas Tremblay -Los Angeles Review of Books

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Book SynopsisA wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Trade Review"The essays themselves offer valuable and engaging interdisciplinary perspectives on design and design theory, and could be successfully assigned in a design studio, exposing students to the too-often overlooked failures in design thinking and execution."—Design and Culture

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Book SynopsisA foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial theses—that sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writer—Tempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, with a final chapter extending the observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages. A classic in German and long available in many other languages, Tempus launched a new discipline, text linguistics, and established a unique career that was marked by precise observation, sensitive cultural outreach, and practical engagement with the situation of migrants. Weinrich’s robust and lucid close readings of famous and little-known authors from all the major languages of western Europe expand our literary horizons and challenge our linguistic understanding.Table of ContentsTranslators’ Note | ix Introduction | 1 Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown 1 Tense in Texts | 9 Tense and Time, 9 • Text Linguistics, 11 • A Preliminary Reflection: Obstinate Signs, 14 • Tense Distribution, 17 • Two Tense Groups: Discussing and Narrating, 22 • On the Freedom of the Narrator, 25 2 Discussing–Narrating | 32 Syntax and Communication, 32 • Register, 36 • Tense in Different Genres, 42 • The World of Discussion, 45 • The World of Narrating, 50 • Tense in the Language of Children, 55 3 Perspective | 60 Time in Texts, 60 • The Future (using French as an example), 64 • The Perfekt in German, 69 • The Perfect in English, 75 • Thornton Wilder: The Ides of March, 78 • The Passé composé in French, 83 • The Passato prossimo in Italian, 87 • The Perfecto compuesto in Spanish, 91 • Narration, Past, Truth, 96 4 Highlighting | 101 Narrative Highlighting, 101 • Narrative Tempo in the Novel, 106 • Baudelaire: “Le vieux saltimbanque” (The Old Mountebank), 111 • Of the Tense of Death, 117 5 Tense in Novellas and Short Stories: Highlighting vs. Aspect | 121 Maupassant, 121 • Pirandello, 126 • Unamuno, Darío, Echegaray, 129 • Hemingway, 135 • Frame Narrative (Boccaccio), 142 • Narration in the Middle Ages, 147 • Frame and Highlighting in Modern Stories, 150 6 Tense Transitions 153 Tense in Dialogue, 153 • Descartes, Rousseau, and the Sequence of Tenses, 164 7 Tense Metaphors | 171 Tense Metaphors in Texts, 171 • Condition and Consequence, Reality and Unreality, 180 8 Tense Combinations | 186 Tense and Person, 186 • Tense and Adverbs, 190 • Combined Transitions, 197 • Semi-finite Verbs, 205 9 A Crisis in Narration? | 211 Tense in Old French, 211 • Evidence of Language Consciousness in French Classicism, 217 • The Time of Newspapers, 224 • Albert Camus: L’étranger, 227 • Oral Narration in French, 236 • A Parallel: Tense in South-German Dialects, 244 10 Other Languages—Other Tenses? | 252 Tense in Ancient Greek, 252 • Tense in Latin, 256 • Whorf, Spengler, and the Hopi Indians, 264 • Toward a New Method of Description, 270 Index | 275

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Book SynopsisThrough an exploration of both practice and theory, this book investigates the relationship between listening and the theatrical encounter in the context of Western theatre and performance. Rather than looking to the stage for a politics or ethics of performance, Rajni Shah asks what work needs to happen in order for the stage itself to appear, exploring some of the factors that might allow or prevent a group of individuals to gather together as an ‘audience’. Shah proposes that the theatrical encounter is a structure that prioritises the attentive over the declarative; each of the five chapters is an exploration of this proposition. The first two chapters propose readings for the terms ‘listening’ and ‘audience’, drawing primarily on Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s writing about the philosophy of listening and Stanley Cavell’s writing about being-in-audience. The third chapter reflects on the work of Lying Fallow, the first of two practice elements which were part of this research, asking whether and how this project aligns with the modes of listening that I have proposed thus far, and introducing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s writing about the preposition ‘beside’ in relation to being-in-audience. In the fourth chapter, I examine the role of invitation in setting up the parameters for being-in-audience, in relation to Sara Ahmed’s writing about arrival and encounter. And in the final chapter the second practice element, Experiments in Listening, operates to expand our thinking about where and how the work of being-in-audience takes place.Blending the boundaries of theoretical, creative and practice-based artistic work, this book is accompanied by a series of five zines. These describe an embodied experience of knowledge from a personal perspective, both playfully and seriously following a line of enquiry developed in each of the chapters.Trade ReviewExperiments in Listening is a critical, caring, poetic and generous gift to scholars invested in epistemic undoings of Euro-colonial conceptualisations of ‘theatre’ and ‘performance’. In this beautifully written book, Shah offers a philosophical recalibration of our fields by enabling readers to enter a mode of listening – an attentiveness to words, worlds and actions – through a ‘commitment to not-knowing’. By compellingly centring hitherto marginalised voices, perspectives and practices, the book demands a recognition of performance-making as a process through which iterative, non-linear and embodied knowledge-systems live and breathe. -- Royona Mitra, reader in dance and performance cultures, Brunel University LondonTable of ContentsAn Introduction0.1. Influences0.2. Contexts and key terms0.3. How to read this bookChapter One: ListeningPrelude1.1. Root structures1.2. Constructing listening1.3. Accommodating othernessChapter Two: AudiencePrelude2.1. Doing nothing2.2. Performing silence2.3. The choreography of attentionChapter Three: GatheringPrelude3.1. Theatre without a show3.2. Resisting visibility3.3. Failing to declare oneselfChapter Four: InvitationPrelude4.1. How we arrive4.2. The invitational frame4.3. An appropriate responseChapter Five: EncounterPrelude5.1. Experiments in Listening5.2. Listening to form5.3. Being in audience to listening5.4. Passing as friendsConclusionAppendix 1: Lying FallowAppendix 2: Experiments in ListeningBibliographyIndex

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