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The question of why Plato censored poetry in his Republic has bedeviled scholars for centuries. In Exiling the Poets, Ramona A. Naddaff offers a strikingly original interpretation of this ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Underscoring not only the repressive but also the productive dimension of literary censorship, Naddaff brings to light Plato's fundamental ambivalence about the value of poetic discourse in philosophical investigation. Censorship, Nadaff argues, is not merely a mechanism of silencing but also provokes new ways of speaking about controversial and crucial cultural and artistic events. It functions philosophically in the Republic to subvert Plato's most crucial ar...
Tracing the the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. For as long as recording and communications technologies have existed, operators have evoked the potential of sound, infrasound, and ultrasound to access anomalous zones of transmission between the realms of the living and the dead. In Unsound:Undead, contributors from a variety of disciplines chart these undead zones, mapping out a nonlinear timeline populated by sonic events stretching from the 8th century BC (the song of the Sirens), to 2013 (acoustic levitation), with a speculative extension into 2057 (the emergence of holographic and hol...
"Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. 0'Antiquities beyond Humanism' seeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled wi...
Looks at narrative in the history of ayurvedic medical literature and the perspectives on illness and patienthood that emerge.
In his rich and learned new book about the naturalization of foreigners, Peter Sahlins offers an unusual and unexpected contribution to the histories of immigration, nationality, and citizenship in France and Europe. Through a study of foreign citizens, Sahlins discovers and documents a premodern world of legal citizenship, its juridical and administrative fictions, and its social practices. Telling the story of naturalization from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Unnaturally French offers an original interpretation of the continuities and ruptures of absolutist and modern citizenship, in the process challenging the historiographical centrality of the French Revolution.Unnatu...
"The first approach can be called vertical since what is explored here is the human body's relationship to the divine, to the bestial and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. The second approach covers the various junctures between the body's "outside" and "inside": it can therefore be called a "psychosomatic" approach, studying the manifestation - or production - of soul and the expression of emotions through the body's attitudes, and, on another level, the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain and death. Finally, the third approach ... brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how a certain organ or bodily substance can be used to justify or challenge the way human society functions ..." - foreword Part 3.
The body is increasingly understood as being at the centre of colonial and post-colonial relationships and textual productions. Creating and circulating images of the undisciplined body of the 'other' was and is a critical aspect of colonialism. Likewise, resistance to colonial practices was also frequently corporeal, with indigenous peoples appropriating, parodying, and subverting those European practices which were used to signify the 'civilized' status of the colonizing body. The Body in the Library reads representations of the corporeal in texts of empire; case studies include: - gendered representations of corporeality - medical regimes - ethnography and photography in the Pacific - cul...
An in-depth study detailing how members of a small Italian community use both traditional practices and expressive forms taken from popular culture to grapple with the social changes brought about by modernity.
Stories of cancer are full of monster and marvels; the monstrousness of the disease and the treatments, the marvels of the cures and the saved lives. Still one of the most dreaded diseases to haunt our imaginations, cancer is more than an illness - it is a cultural phenomenon. People who have cancer are bombarded with competing explanations of their conditions: it is genetically inherited; it is environmentally produced; it is the result of their personality. Teratologies - A Cultural Study of Cancer investigates how this disease is perceived, experienced and theorised in contemporary society. It explores changing beliefs about the causes of, and the cures for, cancer in both biomedicine and...
Through the use of several illustrations from illuminated manuscripts and other media, Resnick engages readers in a discussion of the later medieval notion of Jewish difference.