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The Smoking Book is a dreamlike structure built on the solid foundation of two questions: how does it feel to smoke, and what does smoking mean? Lesley Stern, in an innovative, hybrid form of writing, muses on these questions through intersecting stories and essays that connect, expand, and contract like smoke rings floating through the air. Stern writes of addictions and passionate attachments, of the body and bodily pleasure, of autobiography and cultural history. Smoking is Stern's seductive pretext, her way of entering unknown and mysterious regions. The Smoking Book begins with intimate and vivid accounts of growing up on a tobacco farm in colonial Rhodesia, reminiscences that permeate ...
Diary of a Detour is film scholar and author Lesley Stern's memoir of living with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. She chronicles the fears and daily experience of coming to grips with an incurable form of cancer by describing the dramas and delving into the science. Stern also nudges cancer off center stage by turning to alternative obsessions and pleasures. In seductive writing she describes her life in the garden and kitchen, the hospital and the library, and her travels—down the street to her meditation center, across the border to Mexico, and across the world to Australia. Her immediate world is inhabited with books, movies, politics, and medical reports that provoke essayistic reflections. As her environment is shared with friends, chickens, a cat called Elvis, mountain goats, whales, lions, and microbes the book opens onto a larger than human world. Intimate and meditative, engrossing and singular, Diary of a Detour offers new ideas about what it might mean to live and think with cancer, and with chronic illness more broadly.
This account of Martin Scorsese's films explores 2 main avenues: the way Scorsese remakes other movies (Raging Bull replays The Red Shoes and Taxi Driver as a resurgence of The Searchers); and the way viewers absorb and relate to films.
This volume offers transdisciplinary perspectives on the study of acting and performance in moving image forms. It assembles 26 international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art history and philosophy to investigate the art of acting and the presence of the human body in analog and digital film, animation and video art. The volume includes classical case studies and essays devoted to acting history and acting and genres, but its particular emphasis is on introducing a wide range of groundbreaking theoretical approaches - from continental and analytic philosophy to new media theory and cognitivist research - all of which interrogate the fundamental conceptions of »act« and »actor« that underwrite both popular and academic notions of performance in moving image culture.
In the cinema many were living and many kept on living and many became dead, as Gertrude Stein might say. Some kept on living and some kept on being dead and some became things. Bodies proliferate in cinema. Living bodies to be sure, but also dead bodies, and transitional bodies, suspended between the being of a subject and objecthood. We tend to use the same word to designate both a living and a dead body. We also, of course, use the word 'corpse'. Dead is dead, no doubt, but if there are degrees of deadness then a corpse is probably deader than a dead body. Lesley Stern is more interested in things than in death. It is thus the liveliness of corpses that lures her. Not dead bodies which ac...
Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are org...
Yoda the Persian cat oversees the foster cats but learns a lot when Buddy, a new kitten, joins the group.
Derived from the Latin verb “gerere”-to carry, act, or do-“gesture” has accrued critical currency but has remained undertheorized. Migrations of Gesture addresses this absence and provides a complex theory on the value of gesture for understanding human sign production. Gestures migrate from body to body, from one medium to another, and between cultural contexts. Juxtaposing distinct approaches to gesture in order to explore the ways in which they at once shape and are influenced by culture, the contributors examine the works of writers Henri Michaux and Stphane Mallarm, photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, and filmmakers Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Martin Arnold, along with...
How places, objects, fantasies, histories, and memories get under our skin and how we understand their affective connections.
Historically, phenomenology began in Edmund Husserl’s theory of mathematics and logic, went on to focus for him on transcendental rst philosophy and for others on metaphysics, philosophical anthropology, and theory of interpretation. The c- tinuing focus has thus been on knowledge and being. But if one began without those interests and with an understanding of the phenomenological style of approach, one might well see that art and aesthetics make up the most natural eld to be approached phenomenologically. Contributions to this eld have continually been made in the phenomenological tradition from very early on, but, so to speak, along the side. (The situation has been similar with phenomen...