Dorsality

Author: David Wills
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816653453
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision. With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lvinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.” Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences. David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.

Peripatetic Frame

Author: Tucker Thomas Deane Tucker
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 147440930X
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
From cinema's earliest days, walking and filmmaking have been intrinsically linked. Technologically, culturally and aesthetically, the pioneers of cinema were not only interested in using the camera to scientifically study ambulatory motion, but were also keen to capture the speed and mobile culture of late 19th-century urban life. Photographers such as Felix Nadar took their cameras into the Parisian streets and boulevards as mechanised flneurs, ushering us into the age of the 'mobilised virtual gaze'. But if photography could only embalm modernity in an instant of time, the cinema brought these instants to life again. From Muybridge and Marey's photographic studies of motion to Charlie Chaplin's character 'The Tramp', and from the Steadicam to the police procedural, Thomas Deane Tucker explores the intertwined relationship between cinema and walking from its very first steps - breaking new ground in motion studies and providing a bold new perspective on film history.

Choreographies of the Living

Author: Carrie Rohman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190604425
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

Art Cinema and Neoliberalism

Author: Alex Lykidis
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030610063
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Art Cinema and Neoliberalism surveys cinematic responses to neoliberalism across four continents. One of the first in-depth studies of its kind, this book provides an imaginative reassessment of art cinema in the new millennium by showing how the exigencies of contemporary capitalism are exerting pressure on art cinema conventions. Through a careful examination of neoliberal thought and practice, the book explores the wide-ranging effects of neoliberalism on various sectors of society and on the evolution of film language. Alex Lykidis evaluates the relevance of art cinema style to explanations of the neoliberal order and uses a case study approach to analyze the films of acclaimed directors such as Asghar Farhadi, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Lucrecia Martel in relation to the social, political, and cultural characteristics of neoliberalism. By connecting the aesthetics of art cinema to current social antagonisms, Lykidis positions class as a central concern in our understanding of the polarized dynamics of late capitalism and the escalating provocations of today’s film auteurs.

Erotics of Deconstruction

Author: Lynn Turner
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1399539760
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 429

Book Description
Erotics of Deconstruction takes advantage of over a decade of publications from Derrida's seminars to creatively demonstrate the deep material range of deconstruction and emphasise its under-recognised erotic nature. It activates psychoanalysis without the long-embedded philosophical trajectory that forged the human, psychic life and sexuality as categorically distinct from 'the animal' (inherent to dialectics and psychoanalysis). It generates new conversations with Derrida's feminist contemporaries as they encounter pressing questions in current critical thought. From the larger frame of 'life death' and the broadest auto-affective relation of inside to outside, to the difficult to grasp interface of conceptual and sensible, Erotics of Deconstruction does not retreat to a reparative life force or erotics of the good, but includes the unsettling friction of an originary relation to violence. Parsed by means of case studies from literature, philosophy and vis ual culture, erotics in this volume lap at every edge.

Against Value in the Arts and Education

Author: Sam Ladkin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1783484918
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
Against Value in the Arts and Education proposes that it is often the staunchest defenders of art who do it the most harm, by suppressing or mollifying its dissenting voice, by neutralizing its painful truths, and by instrumentalizing its ambivalence. The result is that rather than expanding the autonomy of thought and feeling of the artist and the audience, art’s defenders make art self-satisfied, or otherwise an echo-chamber for the limited and limiting self-description of people’s lives lived in an “audit culture”, a culture pervaded by the direct and indirect excrescence of practices of accountability. This book diagnoses the counter-intuitive effects of the rhetoric of value. It posits that the auditing of values pervades the fabric of people’s work-lives, their education, and increasingly their everyday experience. The book uncovers figures of resentment, disenchantment and alienation fostered by the dogma of value. It argues instead that value judgments can behave insidiously, and incorporate aesthetic, ethical or ideological values fundamentally opposed to the “value” they purportedly name and describe. The collection contains contributions from leading scholars in the UK and US with contributions from anthropology, the history of art, literature, education, musicology, political science, and philosophy.

Vowel Epenthesis in Loanword Adaptation

Author: Christian Uffmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110934825
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
While it is commonly assumed that languages epenthesize context-free default vowels, this book shows that in loanword adaptation, several strategies are found which interact intricately. Large loanword corpora in Shona, Sranan, Samoan and Kinyarwanda are analyzed statistically, and the patterns are modeled in a version of Optimality Theory which introduces constraints on autosegmental representations. The focus of this book is on English loans in Shona, providing an in-depth empirical and formal analysis of epenthesis in this language. The analysis of additional languages allows for solid typological generalizations. In addition, a diachronic study of epenthesis in Sranan provides insight into how insertion patterns develop historically. In all languages analyzed, default epenthesis exists alongside vowel harmony and spreading from adjacent consonants. While different languages prefer different strategies, these strategies are subject to the same set of constraints, however. In spreading, feature markedness plays an important role alongside sonority. We suggest universal markedness scales which combine with constraints on autosegmental configurations to model the patterns found in individual languages and at the same time to constrain the range of possible crosslinguistic variation.

LO: TECH: POP: CULT

Author: Priscilla Guy
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040016758
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
This edited collection assembles international perspectives from artists, academics, and curators in the field to bring the insights of screendance theory and practice back into conversations with critical methods, at the intersections of popular culture, low-tech media practices, dance, and movement studies, and the minoritarian perspectives of feminism, queer theory, critical race studies and more. This book represents new vectors in screendance studies, featuring contributions by both artists and theoreticians, some of the most established voices in the field as well as the next generation of emerging scholars, artists, and curators. It builds on the foundational cartographies of screendance studies that attempted to sketch out what was particular to this practice. Sampling and reworking established forms of inquiry, artistic practice and spectatorial habits, and suspending and reorienting gestures into minoritarian forms, these conversations consider the affordances of screendance for reimaging the relations of bodies, technologies, and media today. This collection will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance studies, performance studies, cinema and media studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies.

Monstrous media/spectral subjects

Author: Fred Botting
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 0719098122
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
Monstrous media/spectral subjects explores the intersection of monsters, ghosts, representation and technology in Gothic texts from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues that emerging media technologies from the phantasmagoria and magic lantern to the hand-held video camera and the personal computer both shape Gothic subjects and in turn become Gothicised. In a collection of essays that ranges from the Victorian fiction of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh to the music of Tom Waits, world horror cinema and the TV series Doctor Who, this book finds fresh and innovative contexts for the study of Gothic. Combining essays by well-established and emerging scholars, it should appeal to academics and students researching both Gothic literature and culture and the cultural impact of new technologies.

Language Universals and Variation

Author: Mengistu Amberber
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313012482
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Issues addressed in this contributed volume include lexical semantics, morphosyntax, and phonology based on the broad theme of formal approaches to language universals and variation. Aspects of natural language variation are investigated from a formal theoretical perspective, including the Principles and Parameters/Minimalist Program, Lexical Functional Grammar and Optimality Theory. A wide range of languages and language families are considered, including Amharic, Arabic, Bantu, Berber, Chamorro, English, French, Japanese, Malyalam, Polish, Spanish, Tagalog, Turkish, and Warlpiri. This is an important addition to the growing body of literature on language universals and variation from formal theoretical perspectives. It will be a useful reference to linguistics specialists and other cognitive scientists. The topics covered are also diverse, ranging from pronominal clitic variation in dialects of Spanish to passives in Bantu and Polish and the typology of Wh-in-situ questions and vowel place constraints.