Product Description: The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process...read more

Product Description: Romantic Paris is a richly illustrated survey of cultural life in Paris during some of the most tumultuous decades of the city's history. Between the coups d'état of Napoléon Bonaparte and of his nephew, Louis-Napoléon, Paris weathered extremes of political and economic fortune...read more

Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s “Artwork” essay has become a canonical text about the status and place of the fine arts in modern mass culture. Benjamin was especially concerned with the ability of new technologies―notably film, sound recording, and photography―to reproduce works of art in great number. Benjamin could not have foreseen the explosion of imagery and media that has occurred during the past fifty years. Does Benjamin’s famous essay still speak to this new situation? That is the question posed by the editors of this book to a wide range of leading scholars and thinkers across a spectrum of disciplines in the humanities. The essays gathered here do not hazard a univocal reply to that question; rather they offer a rich, wide-ranging critique of Benjamin’s position that refracts and reflects contemporary thinking about the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of life in the digital age.