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This volume deals primarily with absentology, an ontological and social-scientific epistemological mode, dedicated to the analysis of absence. The book is drawn by manifestations of absence wherever they may be encountered. It deals with three terms, ‘the shadow economy’, ‘corruption’ and ‘pollution’, while constructing a non-realist ontology predicated upon the emptiness of all predicates, as expounded by certain strands of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. According to the absentological viewpoint, there is nothing outside, beyond, below or above relations. Relations exist on their own, enchained within an immense, infinite regress, opening and closing upon one another. Absentology is, by consequence of its nonattachment to phenomena, a form of social inquiry fundamentally alien to each and every social form, and it abandons any illusions about the possibility of an escape from the realm of relationality. This book will appeal to students and academics interested in ontological philosophy.
Few scary stories begin with a disclaimer that they are fictional. Instead, they claim to be true even when they are not. Such stories blur the line between fiction and reality, pushing audiences to consider where fiction ends and reality begins. These kinds of horror stories comprise the understudied subgenre of liminal horror. As the first book on this subject, this volume surveys a variety of liminal horror films. It discusses the different variations within liminal horror's sub-genres and considers why horror films are obsessed with the natures of, and borders between, fiction and reality. After first laying out the basic traits of the horror genre in the context of liminality, this book then dives into film more specifically and how the medium is uniquely situated to explore the movement between the fictional and the real. Through lenses such as dreaming, memory, and perception, the following chapters explore the role liminal horror plays in the the human psyche's subconscious/unconscious, and the various functions of the human mind in perceiving, or misperceiving, reality.
This book includes revised dissertation chapters from the author’s (second) PhD, which was awarded in 2020 by Murdoch University, Australia. It also includes three chapters summarising recent developments. This was an innovative, transdisciplinary, research project, using phenomenology as the over-arching meta-paradigm. The investigation involved collaborations and literature reviews across numerous disciplines, including philosophy, geography, ethnoecology, sociology and cultural studies. The book discusses three landscape language (ethnophysiography) case studies with Indigenous peoples in Australia and the USA. It features a detailed discussion of transdisciplinarity and provides a comprehensive example of how this approach can be applied to complex dwelling relationships, which people, from different cultures, have with specific topographic environments, turning terrain into landscape. It involves using phenomenology as a transdisciplinary meta-paradigm and describes phenomenological methods for integrating physical and social sciences, including an analysis of the worldviews of Indigenous peoples (for example, Manyjilyjarra Jukurrpa as Heideggerian topology).
Exhibition spaces are physical places of knowledge production and exchange. Their spatial properties play an important role in contextualizing information. Virtual stagings of exhibitions should therefore retain these properties. The Beyond Matter research project (2019–23) aims to unravel the intertwining of physical and virtual structures and their impact on spatial aspects in art production, curating, and art education, and thus to identify ways to preserve cultural heritage in the digital age. This publication offers a comprehensive overview of the diverse research activities, exhibition and book projects, and symposia that have taken place or emerged in the course of the international Beyond Matter project at the various partner institutions.
Lonely Vectors takes its cue from Singapore Art Museum’s new space at the Tanjong Pagar Distripark as a site of the global economy and its choreography of movements. However, its interests in global flows extend beyond the circulation of goods and commodities to consider the bodies and histories unmoored and set adrift by this world in motion. From the construction of special economic zones to patterns of migration, from seed distribution to peasant solidarity against mega-plantations, from the uneven flow of land and water to the cosmologies and worlds lost to us over time, Lonely Vectors points to the different ways we desire to connect with one another.
An auteur and the creator of multiple cinematic universes, James Wan has become one of the most successful directors in history, his films breaking box office records worldwide. Yet there is little scholarship on Wan's work. This collection of new essays fills the gap with contributions from around the globe offering analysis of his film and television productions, including Saw (2004), Aquaman (2018) and The Conjuring Universe franchise, along with less well-known works like Death Sentence (2007), Dead Silence (2007) and his pilot for the new MacGyver series. For the first time, Wan's films are explored in-depth from wide range of critical perspectives.
Over the past few decades, there has been a renewal of scholarly interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941). At once a commentary and a stark re-evaluation of Bergson’s philosophy, Updating Bergson: A Philosophy of the Enduring Present argues that time should be thought of as a hierarchy of simultaneous durations, the shifting reality of which can be revealed by the philosophical method of intuition. A duration is a perpetually dynamic flow situated in the now. Put simply, for Bergson, change is the substance of things. Nothing exists apart from alteration. Adam Lovasz analyzes Bergson’s philosophy of time, encompassing the three basic types of duration—material, organic, and subjective—and also touches on themes such as relativity, evolution, the problem of materialism and idealism, and the topic of free will. Lovasz connects key questions addressed by Bergson to contemporary scientific debates and paradigms. Shedding new light on the various aspects of Bergson's philosophy, this book is both a provocation and an invitation to think in terms of the enduring present, rather than committing ourselves to a dead past or an absent future.
The monograph examines Louis Cazamian’s writings on the nature of humour. It shows how they tie into Bergson’s theory of the comic as a contrast between life and automatism and into Bergson’s remarks on humour as a special type of comic linguistic transposition. However, it emphasizes that Cazamian’s thinking leads to an original theory. Cazamian assumes that humour has a status that is both artistic and comic. While the artistic status of humour stems from the fact that humour emphasizes the multifaceted character of reality, its comic status arises from ridiculing the inability to respect this character of reality.
Post-Theories in Literary and Cultural Studies focuses on the shifting paradigms in literary and cultural studies. Prompted by the changes and problems on the global scale, the last two decades have seen a resurgence of scholarly interest in theories which are more embedded in the social realities and human condition. This volume shows that theory can reinvent theory and re-define criticism according to the demands of the new millennium. In this context, it examines new ways of considering the relation of post-theory to the concepts such as ethics, aesthetics, truth, value, authenticity, human, and reality to understand the mindset of the new century. This volume presents the various suggestions and concerns of post-theoretical studies that reflect the sensibilities of the contemporary social and cultural life. The book is a source of reference to develop an understanding of this change of attitude in post-theoretical studies towards a more directly and sincerely responsive approach to the current problems worldwide, their representations in literature and language, reflections in theory, roots in socio-political domains, and effects on the material reality.
The ideological roots of the British Empire have been widely discussed in early modern studies, as have maritime settings in the period’s imaginative writing. However, these perspectives have not adequately accounted for how literature’s evolving representations of the common British seaman shaped the early stages of public discourse about Britain’s imperial endeavours. Filling that gap in scholarship, Ships of State argues that literary representations of seaborne labour play a distinct and crucial role in the early formation of British imperial attitudes. The book analyses these representations across an array of popular genres: New World promotion tracts, civic pageantry, stage drama, and broadside ballads. These genres demonstrate how imaginative modes of discourse both reflected and influenced popular conceptions of the common seaman and, by extension, the national ambitions he represented. Placing these depictions into dialogue with the larger national conversation about maritime expansion, Ships of State sheds new light on the role of seaborne labour and its literary representations in creating and sustaining empire.