This book considers how the presence or absence of writing can influence a culture’s distinctive styles of visual art, proposing that many of the most profound developments in the art world are directly correlative with a cultural transition from orality to literacy (that is, from a culture which only has a spoken form of language, to one which has both a spoken and written form). The study contemplates how the ‘psychodynamics’ of orality might radically affect artistic expression, resulti...

“Deep time” is a term which attempts to capture temporal scales far beyond human comprehension. These are stretches of time epitomised by geological and cosmic scale processes, vast enough to make the entirety of human existence appear as little more than a footnote. The past few years have seen a boom in texts dedicated to the study of deep time, extending across a broad range of disciplines which fall markedly outside of its geological roots. These studies are unified by two ideas in par...

This book explores the great influence of twentieth-century artists and art movements on many major writers of the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on four seminal writers who were strongly influenced by very different movements: they are Gertrude Stein and Cubism, William S. Burroughs and Dada, J. G. Ballard and Surrealism, and Douglas Coupland and Pop Art. For these authors the presence and influence of these art movements is not limited to a small cluster of texts, but can be...

Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination closes the gap between ornithological and humanities knowledge. This book contains fifteen innovative essays that bridge various environment-focused perspectives and methodologies in order to include birds in current conversations within the field of animal studies. This collection challenges species centrism, advances a biodiverse ontology, and embraces bird-centered topics as diverse as gaming, comic ...

"Not only an astute diagnosis of the confusions and contradictions of contemporary thought; it also offers compelling alternatives." —Rita Felski, author of Hooked: Art and AttachmentFor decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the po...

An exploration of the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art from the author of Form Follows Libido.In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of "kissing" to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to cap...

Justice Koolhaas's Essays on Modern Art are reproduced alongside at least one of each artist's works that she owned. Unusually, these works were discards; even more unusually, she obtained them on condition that each artist signed a statement disowning them as artworks.Her theory work, a refusenikism written in deliberate opacity, is inspired by her collection of art refuse.Twombly is explored through Walter Benjamin, Deleuze & Guattari and Stéphane Mallarmé. The painter's in...

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles TimesPulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticismLiving by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover...

Why human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon—and why we need art and philosophy to understand ourselvesIn The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.Life supplies art with its raw materials, but art, Noë argues, remakes life by giving us resources to live differently. Our lives are permeat...

How is watching a movie similar to dreaming? What goes on in our minds when we become absorbed in a movie? How does looking “into” a movie screen allow us to experience the thoughts and feelings of a movie’s characters? These and related questions are at the heart of The Power of Movies, a thoughtful, invigorating, and remarkably accessible book about a phenomenon seemingly beyond reach of our understanding. Colin McGinn–“an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes...

Writing A Novel is not a set of rules and regulations. It is an atlas, a guide to finding your own way over the treacherous passes of your first novel.Pulling together his years of experience as a novelist and a teacher, Richard Skinner covers the basics of writing great fiction - narrators, characters, settings - with charm and rigour. But more than that, he argues that the journey towards a final manuscript is as important as the finished article itself.His appro...

A Director Prepares is a thought-provoking examination of the challenges of making theatre. In it, Anne Bogart speaks candidly and with wisdom of the courage required to create 'art with great presence'.Each chapter tackles one of the seven major areas Bogart has identified as both potential partner and potential obstacle to art-making. They are Violence; Memory; Terror; Eroticism; Stereotype; Embarrassment; and Resistance. Each one can be used to generate extraordinary cre...