The production, distribution, and perception of moving images are undergoing a radical transformation. Ever-faster computers, digital technology, and microelectronic are joining forces to produce advanced audiovision -the media vanishing point of the 20th century. Very little will remain unchanged. The classic institutions for the mediation of film - cinema and television - are revealed to be n…
Taboos are not a new phenomenon. Yet, taboos change over time as social customs change, discard old taboos, and create new ones. What does not change, however, is how taboos regulate the way in which we live together in different communities and how they influence our behaviours. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of all sorts of taboos in daily life, many of them do not seem to find their way into f…
Language Shattered is both a history of poetry from the People's Republic of China and a case study of the oeuvre of a leading Chinese poet. After the stifling orthodoxy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the terror of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) brought official Chinese literature to a total standstill. At the same time, disillusioned youths were more or less accidentally exposed to a varie…
Who speaks when you speak? Who writes when you write? Is it “you”—is it the “I” that you think you are? Or are we the chance inheritors of an invasive, exterior parasite—a parasite that calls itself “Being” or “Language?” If our sense of self is best defined on the basis of an exterior, parasitical force that enters us from the outside, then the “self” is no longer a cen…
Brian Moore (1921-1999) is one of the few novelists whose literary portrayal of Catholicism effectively spans the period prior to and following the Second Vatican Council. His novels—from 1955’s Judith Hearne to his final work, 1997’s The Magician’s Wife—are characterized by an enormously varied portrayal of pre- and post-Vatican II Catholicism. Many critics have discussed how Moore 
How does language work? How does language produce truth and beauty? Eleventh-century Arabic scholarship has detailed answers to these universal questions. Language Between God and the Poets reads the theory of four major scholars and asks how the conceptual vocabulary they shared enabled them to create theory in lexicography, theology, logic, and poetics. Their ideas engaged God and poetry at t…
The symposium entitled Vekhi, or Landmarks, is one of the most famous publications in Russian intellectual and political history. Its fame rests on the critique it offers of the phenomenon of the Russian intelligentsia. It was published in 1909, under the editorship of Mikhail Gershenzon, as a polemical response to the revolution of 1905, the failed outcome of which was deemed by all the Landma…
"The Monastery Rules discusses the position of monks and monasteries in pre-1950s Tibetan Buddhist societies. Using the monastic guidelines (bca’ yig) as primary sources, this book examines the impact of Buddhist monastic institutions on Tibetan societies by looking at their monastic policies that deal with organization, economy, justice, and public relations. As this type of literature has n…
Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what matters to them, from working through conflict with smart lights to celebrating gender transition with selfies. We have been warned about the psychological perils of technology: distraction, difficulty empathizing, and loss of the ability (or desire) to carry on a conversation. But our devices and data are woven into our lives. W…
What do planners need to know in order to use narrative approaches responsibly in their practice? This practical field guide makes insights from narrative research accessible to planners through a glossary of key concepts in the field of narrative in planning. What makes narratives coherent, probable, persuasive, even necessary - but also potentially harmful, manipulative and divisive? How can …