Product Description: Why pause and study this particular painting among so many others ranged on a gallery wall? Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, is at play; it couples surprise with a wish to know more, the pleasurable promise that what is novel or rare may become familiar...read more

Product Description: This book is primarily intended to be used as an introductory reference for patients in pain as well as their family members. It also contains a great deal of information for the medically sophisticated patient or caregiver as well as certain topics that would be best understood by medical professionals or very medically sophisticated laymen such as medical-legal attorneys...read more

Product Description: Breaking off the ordinary flow of experience, the passions create a state of exception. In their suddenness and intensity, they map a personal world, fix and qualify our attention, and impel our actions. Outraged anger drives us to write laws that will later be enforced by impersonal justice...read more

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Product Description: In this bold reinterpretation of American culture, Philip Fisher describes generational life as a series of renewed acts of immigration into a new world. Along with the actual flood of immigrants, technological change brings about an immigration of objects and systems, ways of life and techniques for the distribution of ideas...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In his 1923 essay, "The Problem of Museums," Paul Valery called the museum a "strange organized disorder" and likened it to a room where ten orchestras played simultaneously. Malraux similarly argued that the museum was a place for "pitting works of art against each other." But regardless of their problems, museums have become powerful influences in modern culture, deciding which artists and which of their works are to be preserved as part of our history. Indeed, such is their power that some critics have remarked that it has become the museum, and not the artist, who creates art. In Making and Effacing Art, Philip Fisher charts the pivotal role the museum has played in modern culture, revealing why the museum has become central to industrial society and how, in turn, artists have adapted to the museum's growing power, shaping their works with the museum in mind. For instance, Fisher contends that just as a medieval sculptor would link a statue stylistically to the cathedral it would adorn, the modern artist creates his work to mirror its ultimate destination, the museum. Using Jasper Johns' Divers (1962) as an example, he shows how this painting is almost like distinct works placed side by side, that is, Divers is itself a wall of paintings that mirror the wall of paintings in a museum gallery. He also points out that artists such as Frank Stella create sequences within their own work to echo one of the museum's main functions, the sequential ordering of styles. In addition, Fisher includes an extensive discussion of the function of the museum in industrialized society (as the organization mediating between the realm of technology and that of art making and consumption) and he describes a major shift in both the theory and practice of the visual arts, which he argues have been brought about ultimately by the processes of modern technological production. Along the way, he offers insightful commentary on the work of major artists including Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Degas, Picasso, Klee, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and many others. Vividly illustrated with numerous halftones and 14 color plates, Making and Effacing Art is an important contribution to our understanding of modern art and culture. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In The New American Studies a new generation of Americanists reflects on a society of change and changing alliances. American life is here valued for its capacity for compromise and negotiation, its openness to new actors and fresh scripts.

Product Description: Fisher places the work of George Eliot within the great evolution that constitutes the nineteenth-century English novel. He reports not only about her work, but about an evolving complex literary form. Fisher examines Eliot’s work as responding to “the loss of society,” the breakdown between public life and individua moral history...read more