"Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of ""critical posthumanisms"" in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today's ""critical posthumanisms,"" even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if ""the human"" is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny ""contemporary""-and ally-of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism."

Product Description: In recent decades, both medical humanities and medical history have emerged as rich and varied sub-disciplines. Medicine, Health and the Arts is a collection of specially commissioned essays designed to bring together different approaches to these complex fields...read more

Product Description: In this book, Michael Brown provides original and critical analysis of the state of the social sciences and the humanities. He examines the different disciplines that address human affairs--from sociology, philosophy, political science, and anthropology to the humanities in general--to understand their common ground...read more

Product Description: The term ‘two cultures’ was coined more than 50 years ago by scientist and novelist C.P. Snow to describe the divergence in the world views and methods of scientists and the creative sector. This divergence has meant that innovation systems and policies have focused for decades on science, engineering, technology and medicine and the industries that depend on them...read more

How might the pornographic be associated with Brecht's and Benjamin's media theories? How are Foucault's and Deleuze's writings on visibilities "postcolonial"? What happens when Rancière's discussions of art are juxtaposed with cultural anthropology? What does a story by Lao She about collecting reveal about political collectivism in modern China? How does Girard's notion of mimetic violence speak to identity politics? How might Arendt's and Derrida's reflections on forgiveness be supplemented by a film by Lee Chang-dong? What can Akira Kurosawa's films about Japan say about American Studies? How is Asia framed transnationally, with what consequences for those who self-identify as Asian?These questions are dispersively heterologous yet mutually implicated. This paradoxical character of their discursive relations is what Rey Chow intends with the word "entanglements," by which she means, first, an enmeshment of topics: the mediatized image in modernist reflexivity; captivation and identification; victimhood; the place of East Asia in globalized Western academic study. Beyond enmeshment, she asks, can entanglements be phenomena that are not defined by affinity or proximity? Might entanglements be about partition and disparity rather than about conjunction and similarity?Across medial forms (including theater, film, narrative, digitization, and photographic art), and against more popular trends of declaring things and people to be in flux, Chow proposes conceptual frames that foreground instead aesthetic, ontological, and sentient experiences of force, dominance, submission, fidelity, antagonism, masochism, letting-go, and the attraction to self-annihilation. Boundary, trap, capture, captivation, sacrifice, and mimesis: these riveting terms serve as analytic pressure points in her readings, articulating perversity, madness, and terror to pursuits of freedom.

Product Description: In what we consider to be a timely collection of essays, the volume "Rethinking the Humanities: Paths & Challenges" tries to reflect upon the present condition of the humanities and their manifold challenges, acutely dramatized in an era of increasing contingency and globalization...read more

Product Description: The philosophy of the humanistic sciences has been a blind-spot in analytic philosophy. This book argues that by adopting an appropriate pragmatic analysis of explanation and interpretation it is possible to show that scientific practice of humanistic sciences can be understood on similar lines to scientific practice of natural and social sciences...read more

Product Description: The first in a series that will provide a comprehensive comparative history of the humanities, this book focuses on the early modern period in the development of this dynamic field. Specialists in philology, musicology, art history, linguistics, and literary theory examine the intertwining nature of these various disciplines, as well as their impact on the sciences...read more

Product Description: In recent decades the humanities have been in thrall to postmodern skepticism, while Darwinists, brimming with confidence in the genuine progress they have made in the sciences of biology and psychology, have set their sights on rescuing the humanities from the ravages of postmodernism...read more

Product Description: 'Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Ways of Knowing in the Humanities' is a collection of original essays proposing a fresh examination of epistemological questions relevant to scholars in any discipline of the humanities. Is objective knowledge still a viable ideal? Can art produce or express knowledge of any kind? Is the body a promising medium for a knowledge less abstract or logocentric than the kind Western culture has favoured so far? How are epistemological regimes maintained with the use of established linguistic tropes? Is knowledge to be resisted or employed as a tool of resistance? Distinguished as well as young, emerging scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, comparative literature, musicology and art theory discuss concrete case studies in which these questions arise...read more