Photography and the Optical Unconscious
Photography and the Optical Unconscious

Author: Shawn Michelle Smith

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-05-04

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 0822372991

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Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious. They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning. The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche. Contributors. Mary Bergstein, Jonathan Fardy, Kristan Horton, Terri Kapsalis, Sarah Kofman, Elisabeth Lebovici, Zoe Leonard, Gabrielle Moser, Mignon Nixon, Thy Phu, Mark Reinhardt, Shawn Michelle Smith, Sharon Sliwinski, Laura Wexler, Kelly Wood, Andrés Mario Zervigón

The Life of Imagination
The Life of Imagination

Author: Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-10-30

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0231548168

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Imagination allows us to step out of the ordinary but also to transform it through our sense of wonder and play, artistic inspiration and innovation, or the eureka moment of a scientific breakthrough. In this book, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei offers a groundbreaking new understanding of its place in everyday experience as well as the heights of creative achievement. The Life of Imagination delivers a new conception of imagination that places it at the heart of our engagement with the world—thinking, acting, feeling, making, and being. Gosetti-Ferencei reveals imagination’s roots in embodied human cognition and its role in shaping our cognitive ecology. She demonstrates how imagination arises from our material engagements with the world and at the same time endows us with the sense of an inner life, how it both allows us to escape from reality and aids us in better understanding it. Drawing from philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, developmental psychology, literary theory, and aesthetics, Gosetti-Ferencei engages a spectacular range of examples from ordinary thought processes and actions to artistic, scientific, and literary feats to argue that, like consciousness itself, imagination resists reductive explanation. The Life of Imagination offers a vital account of transformative thinking that shows how imagination will be essential in cultivating a future conducive to human flourishing and to that of the life around us.

Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel
Wordsworth and the Art of Philosophical Travel

Author: Mark Offord

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-07-07

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1107155584

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This book offers a new interpretation of Wordsworth's poetry, combining concepts of travel, 'states of nature' and language.

Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature
Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature

Author: Dominic O'Key

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-01-13

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1350189634

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We are living through a period of planetary crisis, a time in which the mass production and consumption of some animals is made possible by the mass extinction of many others. What is the role of literature in responding to this war against animals? How might literary criticism read for animals? In Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, Dominic O'Key develops the bold argument that deep attention to literary form enables us to rethink human-animal relations. Through chapters on W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, as well as close readings of works by Arundhati Roy and Richard Powers, O'Key reveals how literary forms can unsettle the fictions of human supremacy and craft alternative, creaturely forms of relation. An intervention into both the humanism of literary theory and the representational focus of animal studies, this provocative work makes the case for a new formalism in light of our obligation to fellow creatures.

Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation
Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation

Author: Miguel Vedda

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 3030679659

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This book analyses multiple facets of Kracauer’s work, comprehending the essayistic, narrative, philosophical, theoretical and critical writings, and putting special emphasis on some aspects: the phenomenology of metropolis, the theory of historiographic method, the reflections on the crisis of the subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity, the new forms of perception and aesthetic behaviour in late capitalism, the function of critic-intellectuals, the sociology of the middle classes, the theory of fascism, the aesthetical and sociological reflections on literary genres, the politicization of melancholy. An original feature of this book is the attention it pays to the links between Kracauer’s theoretical and critical writings and the traditions of heterodox Marxism, against a habitual tendency to obliterate the political (and emancipatory) dimension in the German author.

Metropolis and Experience
Metropolis and Experience

Author: Hye-Joon Yoon

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-10-18

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1443834920

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Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce offers a close reading of the major texts of Defoe, Dickens, and Joyce, in their respective historical contexts and in comparison with their intertextual companions, from seventeenth-century “character” pamphlets through Baudelaire to Calvino. In doing so, it challenges the quietist complacency of specialization prevalent in current academia to contribute to a critique of urban modernity in the tradition of Simmel, Benjamin, and Lefebvre. Taking its cue from Benjamin’s bisection of “experience” into subjective sensory Erlebnis and communal reflective Erfahrung, Metropolis and Experience uses this binary pair as a categorical guide in its analysis of the stylistic and thematic adventures of the three centerpiece authors. Whereas Defoe’s novels embody a Simmelian metropolitan mentality through its narration of lived experience in paratactic prose, Dickens strives to humanize the sprawling Victorian metropolis into an experience for communal sharing. In Joyce’s works, the colonial dejections and belatedness of the Hibernian metropolis are transformed into an exuberant excess where both Erlebnis and Erfahrung meet their joyous end. This investigation of the interconnections between the metropolis, experience, and the novel takes place in tandem with a sustained query on non-literary subtopics such as finance capitalism and urban class antagonism. This is literary criticism charged with relevance for the age of “Occupy Wall Street.”

Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education
Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education

Author: Tyson E. Lewis

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2020-02-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1438477538

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Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is the first comprehensive analysis of educational themes across the entirety of the critical theorist's diverse writings. Starting with Benjamin's early reflections on teaching and learning, Tyson E. Lewis argues that the aesthetic and cultural forms to which Benjamin so often turned—namely, radio broadcasts, children's theatrical productions, collections, cityscapes, public cinemas, and word games—swell with educational potentialities. What emerges from Lewis's reading is a constellational curriculum composed of minor practices such as poor teaching, absentminded learning, and nondurational studying. This curriculum carries political significance, offering an antidote to past and present forms of fascist manipulation, hardness, and coldness. Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is a testimony to Benjamin's belief that "everyone is an educator and everyone needs to be educated and everything is education."

The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination
The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination

Author: Michael Golston

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0817361006

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How the tropes of science fiction infuse and inform avant-garde poetics and many other kindred arts This insightful, playful monograph from Golston does exactly what it advertises: modeling poetics based on how poetry (and some parallel artistic endeavors) has filtered through a century-plus of science fiction. This is not a book about science fiction in and of itself, but it is a book about the resonances of science-fiction tropes and ideas in poetic language. The germ of Golston's project is a throwaway line in Robert Smithson's Entropy and the New Monuments about how cinema supplanted nature as inspiration for many of his fellow artists: "The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of 'low budget' mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance." Golston charts how the demotic appeal of sci-fi, much like that of the B-movie, cross-pollinated into poetry and other branches of the avant garde. Golston creates what he calls a "regular Rube Goldberg machine" of a critical apparatus, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Gilles Deleuze. He starts by acknowledging that, per the important work of Darko Suvin to situate science fiction critically, the genre is premised on cognitive estrangement. But he is not interested in the specific nuts and bolts of science fiction as it exists but rather how science fiction has created a model not only for other poets but also for musicians and landscape artists. Golston's critical lens moves around quite a bit, but he begins with familiar enough subjects: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mina Loy, William S. Burroughs. From there he moves into more "alien" terrain: Ed Dorn's long poem Gunslinger, the discombobulated work of Clark Coolidge. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Jimi Hendrix all come under consideration. The result of Golston's restless, rich scholarship is the first substantial monograph on science fiction and avant-garde poetics, using Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School dialectics, and Deleuzian theory to show how the avant-garde inherently follows the parameters of sci fi, in both theme and form.

Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci
Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci

Author: Dario Gentili

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-16

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1040129935

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This book marks a missed encounter between two of the most influential Marxist thinkers of our age, Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci, studied here for the first time side by side. Benjamin and Gramsci were contemporaries, whose births and deaths took place within a few years of each other in Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Two Marxists sui generis, they radically changed Marxism’s themes and vocabulary, profoundly influencing the most significant analyses and debates. At a time in which Marxism was considered to be outdated and in crisis, both Gramsci’s and Benjamin’s thoughts provided resources for its renewal: particularly in postcolonial studies for Gramsci and in new media studies for Benjamin. Both were victims of fascism, on the threshold of the catastrophe of the Second World War. These two philosophers’ posthumous fortune depended on the transmission of their thought, which was first entrusted to friends and comrades, and then to entire generations of scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Editors, Dario Gentili, Elettra Stimilli, and Gabriele Guerra explore with leading voices on Benjamin and Gramsci the most relevant and topical issues today. The book gives an indispensable new perspective in Marxism for students and researchers alike.

Social Theory for Today
Social Theory for Today

Author: Alex Law

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2014-12-01

Total Pages: 659

ISBN-13: 1473911141

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This book is distinctive for extending the usual sociological reach, reopening territory that has lain fallow, set aside from the well-ploughed fields of orthodox social theory. In doing so, Law not only produces fresh insight into familiar theorists but guards against collective forgetting of the sociological canon. - Professor Bridget Fowler, University of Glasgow "An excellent book, it will be welcomed and read widely by advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in sociology, cultural studies, social theory and beyond." - Professor Chris Shilling, University of Kent Social Theory for Today guides students through the ‘turns’ of past and present social theory as it attempts to wrestle with a recurring sense of crisis in social relations and social theory. Drawing on both classical and contemporary sources, Alex Law provides readers with a firm grasp of competing perspectives. Too often social theories attempt to dominate the field by casting rival theorists, past and present, as deluded fools, while the more familiar ‘big names’ in social theory are subject to ever-increasing commentary that runs in ever-decreasing circles. This survey of social theory and crisis lessens the temptation to engage in internal theoretical polemics and esoteric wordplay. Social theory must become practical and specific if it is to become a means of orientation for uncertain times. This is a must-read for upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students looking for a vibrant and extended understanding of social theory.