Amputation in Literature and Film: Artificial Limbs, Prosthetic Relations, and the Semiotics of “Loss” explores the many ways in which literature and film have engaged with the subject of amputation. The scholars featured in this volumedraw upon a wide variety of texts, both lesser-known and canonical, across historical periods and language traditions to interrogate the intersections of disability studies with social, political, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Whether focusi...

The novels of the South African writer J. M. Coetzee won him global recognition and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work offers substantial pedagogical richness and challenges. Coetzee treats such themes as race, aging, gender, animal rights, power, violence, colonial history and accountability, the silent or silenced other, sympathy, and forgiveness in an allusive and detached prose that avoids obvious answers or easy ethical reassurance.Part 1 of this volume, "Material...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A transformative guide to reconnecting with and harnessing your authentic self so you can lead a more fulfilled, complete life, from the world-renowned former director of the Jung Institute“A brilliant and absorbing work . . . [James] Hillman dares us to believe we are each meant to be here, that we are needed by the world around us.”—Publishers WeeklyPlato called it “daimon,” the Romans “gen...

"One of our finest novelists has long been a brilliant explorer of brain and mind" as seen in this collection of essays (Oliver Sacks, New York Times– bestselling author of Awakenings ) .The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting ( Mysteries of t...

Loneliness is a difficult subject to address, because it has such negative connotations. But the truth is that wherever there are people, there is loneliness: everyone is lonely at some point in their lives. You can belonely in a crowd or at home, outdoors or in an empty church, and countless songs have been written about the condition. For many people, loneliness can significantly impact their quality of life and their physical and mental health. At the same time, our best moments ...

Here are case studies in which myths have helped Dr. May's patients make sense out of an often senseless world.It happens almost daily in a therapist's office. A patient, recalling a person, an event, an emotion, quite unexpectedly supplies a link from a life in the present to one of the durable myths of our culture. In this moment, the myth becomes a mirror, revealing to the patient the source of disturbance and pain in a pattern of behavior that often stretches a...

‘Ugly as sin’, ‘ugly duckling’, ‘rear its ugly head’. The word ‘ugly’ is used freely, yet it is a loaded term: from the simply plain and unsightly to the repulsive and even offensive, definitions slide all over the place. Hovering around ‘feared and dreaded’, ugliness both repels and fascinates. But the concept of ugliness has a lineage that has long haunted our cultural imagination.In this riveting book, Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ...

What's funny and why. This book explains six classic theories of humor, with many examples.

This reader brings together a selection of seminal papers by Christopher Bollas.Essays such as "The Fascist State of Mind," "The Structure of Evil," and "The Functions of History" have established his position as one of the most significant cultural critics of our time. Also included are examples of his psychoanalytical writings, such as "The Transformational Object" and "Psychic Genera," that deepen and renew interest in unconscious cre...

Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse develops a narrative theory of the pervasive use of disability as a device of characterization in literature and film. It argues that, while other marginalized identities have suffered cultural exclusion due to a dearth of images reflecting their experience, the marginality of disabled people has occurred in the midst of the perpetual circulation of images of disability in print and visual media. The manuscript's s...

In the course of nearly thirty years of work with patients in psychiatric hospitals and private practice, Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere have uncovered the ways in which transference and countertransference are affected by the experience of social catastrophe. Handed down from one generation to the next, the unspoken horrors of war, betrayal, dissociation, and disaster in the families of patient and analyst alike are not only revived in the therapeutic relationship but, when un...

This open access book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, Fin de Siècle Aesthetics, American Poetics and the Postcolonial Novel, this book offers the first transhistorical study of breath in...