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Philosophy and
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Pilate and Jesus

GIORGIO AGAMBEN
TRANSLATED BY ADAM KOTSKO

Pontius Pilate is one of the most

enigmatic figures in Christian theology. The only non-Christian to be
named in the Nicene Creed, he is
presented as a cruel colonial overseer
in secular accounts, as a conflicted
judge convinced of Jesuss innocence
in the Gospels, and as either a pious
Christian or a virtual demon in
later Christian writings. This book
takes Pilates role in the trial of Jesus
as a starting point for investigating
the function of legal judgment in
Western society and the ways that such
judgment requires us to adjudicate
the competing claims of the eternal
and the historical. Coming just as
Agamben is bringing his decades-long
Homo Sacer project to an end, Pilate
and Jesus sheds considerable light
on what is at stake in that series as a
whole. At the same time, it stands on
its own, perhaps more than any of the
authors recent works. It thus serves as
a perfect starting place for readers who
are curious about Agambens approach
but do not know where to begin.
MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS

88 pages, 2015
9780804794541 Paper $15.95 $12.76 sale
9780804792332 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

Borrowed Light

Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies

TIMOTHY BRENNAN

A critical revaluation of the humanist

tradition, Borrowed Light makes
the case that the 20th century is the
anti-colonial century. The sparks of
concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of
intellectual malcontents from all over
the world in interwar Europe. Many
of this eras principal figures were
formed by the experience of revolution
on Europes semi-developed Eastern
periphery, making their ideas especially
pertinent to current ideas about autonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the
debates most prominent thenhuman
vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs.
oral cultures, the authoritarian state
vs. the representative state and, above
all, scientific rationality vs. humanist
reasonremain central today.
Timothy Brennan returns to the
scientific Enlightenment of the 17th
century and its legacies. In readings
of the showdown between Spinoza
and Vico, Hegels critique of liberalism,
and Nietzsches antipathy towards the
colonies and social democracy, Brennan identifies the divergent lines of the
first anticolonial theorya literary and
philosophical project with strong ties to
what we now call Marxism. Along the
way, he assesses prospects for a renewal
of the study of imperial culture.
304 pages, 2014
9780804790543 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804788328 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

StanfordBRIEFS

Stanford Briefs
an imprint of
Stanford University Presspresents an innovative

collection of new books. Published across our various

disciplines, these books address the essence of a topic.
Briefs are essay-length works freed from the technical
requirements of the scholarly journal article and the
elaborate documentation of the full-length research
monograph.

Our Word Is Our Bond

How Legal Speech Acts

MARIANNE CONSTABLE

Words can be misspoken, misheard,

misunderstood, or misappropriated;
they can be inappropriate, inaccurate,
dangerous, or wrong. When speech
goes wrong, law often steps in as
itself a speech act or series of speech
acts. Marianne Constable argues
that, as language, modern law makes
claims and hears claims of justice and
injustice, which can admittedly go
wrong. She proposes an alternative to
understanding law as a system of rules,
or as fundamentally a policy-making
and problem-solving tool. Constable
introduces and develops insights from
Austin, Cavell, Reinach, Nietzsche,
Derrida and Heidegger to show how
claims of law are performative and
passionate utterances or social acts that
appeal implicitly to justice.
Our Word Is Our Bond explains that
neither law nor justice are what lawyers
and judges say, nor what officials and
scholars claim they are. However
inadequate our law and language may
be to the world, Constable argues that
we know our world and name our ways
of living and being in it through law
and language
THE CULTURAL LIVES OF LAW

232 pages, 2014

9780804774949 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale
9780804774932 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale

Short and

The National
Park to Come

incisive, Briefs

MARGRET
GREBOWICZ

should appeal

with illustrations
by Jacqueline
Schlossman

to specialists
and nonspe-

Historians of wilderness have shown that

cialists alike
nature reserves are
by reducing forused ideologically in
the construction of
malization and
American national
focusing on deidentity. But the
contemporary
probbates of broadlem of wilderness
er interest.
demands examination of how profoundly
nature-in-reserve influences something
more fundamental, namely what counts
All Briefs are peer-reas being well, having a life, and having a
viewed, and the criteria
future. What is wellness for the citizens
that we use to select and to whom the parks are said to democratically belong? And how does the presence
approve each manuof foreigners threaten this wellness?
script match the rigor
Recent critiques of the Wilderness Act
focus exclusively on its ecological effects,
and high quality of our
ignoring the extent to which wilderness
traditional monographs.
policy affects our contemporary collective experience and political imagination.
Without sacrificing the
Tracing the challenges that migration
quality of carefully edited and indigenousness currently pose to the
national park system and the Wilderness
and produced content,
Act, Grebowicz foregrounds concerns
these books are pubwith social justice against the ecological
lished on four-month
and aesthetic ones that have created and
continue to shape these environments.

schedules, allowing for

time-sensitive dialogue.

88 pages, 20 illustrations, 2015

9780804789622 Paper $12.99 $10.39 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

The Other Adam

Smith
MIKE HILL AND
WARREN MONTAG

The Other Adam Smith represents the next wave of critical

thinking about the still underexamined work of this paradigmatic Enlightenment thinker.
Not simply another book about
Adam Smith, it allows and
even necessitates his inclusion
in the realm of theory in the
broadest sense. Moving beyond
his usual economic and moral
philosophical texts, Mike Hill
and Warren Montag take seriously Smiths entire corpus, his
writing on knowledge, affect, sociability and government, and
political economy, as constituting a comprehensivethough
highly contestablesystem of thought. We meet not just Smith
the economist, but Smith the philosopher, Smith the literary
critic, Smith the historian, and Smith the anthropologist.
Placed in relation to key thinkers such as Hume, Lord Kames,
Fielding, Hayek, Von Mises, and Agamben, this other Adam
Smith, far from being localized in the history of eighteenthcentury economic thought or ideas, stands at the center of the
most vibrant and contentious debates of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.
This outstanding interdisciplinary achievement spans English literature,
social theory, history of philosophy, history of the book, social theory,
and political history in what is a socially important and largely original
re-evaluation of the argument for a market society and Liberal political
economy more generally.
Eric Schliesser, Ghent University

416 pages, 2014

9780804792943 Paper $29.95 $23.96 sale
9780804791946 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale

New Demons

Rethinking Power and Evil Today

SIMONA FORTI
TRANSLATED BY ZAKIYA HANAFI

As long as we care about suffering in

the world, says political philosopher
Simona Forti, we are compelled to
inquire into the question of evil. But
is the concept of evil still useful in a
postmodern landscape where absolute
values have been leveled and relativized by a historicist perspective? Given
our current unwillingness to judge
others, what signposts remain to guide
our ethical behavior?
Surveying the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophical
debates on evil, Forti concludes that
it is time to leave behind what she
calls the Dostoevsky paradigm: the
dualistic vision of an omnipotent
monster pitted against absolute, helpless victims. In its place, she offers a
different genealogy of the relationship
between evil and power. At the center
of contemporary evil she posits the
passive attitude towards rule-following,
the need for normalcy, and the
desire for obedience nurtured by our
contemporary mass democracies. In
our times, she contends, evil must be
explored in tandem with our stubborn
desire to stay alive at all costs as much
as with our deep need for recognition:
the new modern absolutes.
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

416 pages, 2014

9780804792950 Paper $29.95 $23.96 sale
9780804786249 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Convulsing Bodies
Religion and Resistance
in Foucault
MARK D. JORDAN

The Far Reaches

Phenomenology, Ethics, and Social

Renewal in Central Europe
MICHAEL D. GUBSER

The phenomenological movement not

only produced systematic reflection
on common moral concerns such as
distinguishing right from wrong and
explaining the status of values; it also
called on philosophy to renew European societies facing crisis, an aim that
inspired thinkers in interwar Europe as
well as later communist bloc dissidents.
Despite this legacy, phenomenology
continues to be largely discounted as
esoteric and solipsistic, the last gasp of a
Cartesian dream to base knowledge on
the isolated rational mind. Intellectual
histories tend to cite Husserls epistemological influence on philosophies
like existentialism and deconstruction
without considering his social or ethical
imprint. And while a few recent scholars have begun to note phenomenologys wider ethical resonance, its image
as stubbornly academic continues to
hold sway. The Far Reaches challenges
that image by tracing the first history
of phenomenological ethics and social
thought in Central Europe, from its
founders Franz Brentano and Edmund
Husserl through its reception in East
Central Europe by dissident thinkers
such as Jan Patoka, Karol Wojtya
(Pope John Paul II), and Vclav Havel.

By using religion to get at

the core concepts of Michel
Foucaults thinking, this book
offers a strong alternative to
the way that the philosophers
work is read across the
humanities. Foucault was
famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to
ancient ethics and the parent
of modern discipline and was
always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches.
Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his
thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and how
they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some
sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about
religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages
religious rhetoric page after pageeven when religion is not
his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can
see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but
a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on
bodiesand how bodies resist.
Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to
frustrate academic expectations about history and theory,
Mark Jordan gives equal weight to the performative and
theatrical aspects of Foucaults writing or lecturing. How does
Foucault stage possibilities of self-transformation? How are
his books or lectures akin to the rituals and liturgies that he
dissects in them? Convulsing Bodies follows its own game of
hide-and-seek with the agents of totalizing systems (not least
in the academy) and gives us a Foucault who plays with his
audiences as he plays for themor teaches them.
272 pages, 2014
9780804792769 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804789028 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

360 pages, 2014

9780804792523 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale
9780804790659 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

The Manhattan
Project
A Theory of a City
DAVID KISHIK

In The Manhattan Project,

David Kishik dares to
imagine a Walter Benjamin
who did not commit suicide
in 1940, but managed instead
to escape the Nazis to begin a
long, solitary life in New York.
During his anonymous, posthumous existence, while he
was haunting and haunted by
his new city, Benjamin composed a sequel to his Arcades Project. Just as his incomplete
masterpiece revolved around Paris, capital of the nineteenth
century, this spectral text was dedicated to New York, capital
of the twentieth. Kishiks sui generis work of experimental
scholarship or fictional philosophy is thus presented as a
study of a manuscript that was never written.
The fictitious prolongation of Benjamins life will raise more
than one eyebrow, but the wit, breadth, and incisiveness of
Kishiks own writing is bound to impress. Kishik reveals a
world of secret affinities between New York City and Paris,
the flneur and the homeless person, the collector and the
hoarder, the covered arcade and the bare street, but also between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism,
Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane
Jacobs. A critical celebration of New York City, The Manhattan Project reshapes our perception of urban life, and rethinks
our very conception of modernity.
The Manhattan Project channels Walter Benjamin in a quest to understand twentieth-century New York. Deftly blending history and fiction
in order to capture the citys delirious yet weighty reality, David Kishik
offers astute observations of phenomena as diverse as photography, the
character of the street, Andy Warhol, dance, and the New York Public
Library. Turning the pages of this fascinating book is like turning a New
York street corner only to find some new and unexpected pleasure.
Todd May, Clemson University

288 pages, 30 illustrations, 2015

9780804786034 Cloth $35.00 $28.00 sale

Radical Equality

Ambedkar, Gandhi, and the

Risk of Democracy
AISHWARY KUMAR

B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of Indias

constitution, and Indian nationalist M.K.
Gandhi, the two figures whose policies
and legacies have most contributed to
Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable
views of empire and political and social
reform. As such, they are rarely studied
together. This book reassesses their
complex relationship, focusing on what
it identifies as a mutual commitment to
unconditional equality as inseparable
from the struggle for sovereignty.
It traces the philosophical foundations
of their thought in Indian and Western
traditions, both religious and secular,
and explores the paradoxes and risks of
democracy in modern political thought.
It is particularly attentive to slippages
whereby their militant demands for
egalitarian justice are compromised
or contradicted by their own moral
practices, and where the language of
nonviolence lapses into that of force
or sacrifice. Excavating the intellectual kinship of Ambedkar and Gandhi,
Aishwary Kumar allows them to shed
light on each other, and the story of
their struggle against inequality, violence,
and empire thus transcends national
boundaries and unfolds within a broader
twentieth-century history of ideas.
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

416 pages, 2015

9780804791953 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

The Emotional Logic

of Capitalism
What Progressives
Have Missed
MARTIJN KONINGS

The World of Freedom

Heidegger, Foucault, and the

Politics of Historical Ontology
ROBERT NICHOLS

Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault

are two of the most important and
influential thinkers of the twentieth
century. Each has spawned volumes of
secondary literature and sparked fierce,
polarizing debates, particularly about
the relationship between philosophy
and politics. And yet, to date there
exists almost no work that presents
a systematic and comprehensive
engagement of the two in relation to
one another. The World of Freedom
addresses this lacuna.
Robert Nichols demonstrates that it is
not merely interesting but necessary to
read Heidegger and Foucault alongside
one another if we are to properly
understand the shape of twentiethcentury Continental thought. Through
close, scholarly engagement with
primary texts, he develops original and
demanding insights into the relationship between fundamental and historical ontology, modes of objectification
and subjectification, and an ethopoetic
conception of freedom. He also reveals
the role that Heideggers reception in
France played in Foucaults intellectual
developmentthe first major work to
do so while taking full advantage of
the recent publication of Foucaults last
Collge de France lectures of the 1980s.

The capitalist market, progressives bemoan, is a cold

monster: it disrupts social
bonds, erodes emotional
attachments, and imposes an
abstract utilitarian rationality.
But what if such hallowed
critiques are completely
misleading? This book argues
that the production of new
sources of faith and enchantment is crucial to the dynamics
of the capitalist economy. Distinctively secular patterns of
attraction and attachment give modern institutions a binding
force that was not available to more traditional forms of rule.
Elaborating his alternative approach through an engagement
with the semiotics of money and the genealogy of economy,
Martijn Konings uncovers capitalisms emotional and
theological content in order to understand the paradoxical
sources of cohesion and legitimacy that it commands. In
developing this perspective, he draws on pragmatist thought
to rework and revitalize the Marxist critique of capitalism.
This extraordinarily incisive and provocative book goes a long way
toward explaining the tenacious grip of money on the American
moral imagination.
Eugene McCarraher, Villanova University

184 pages, 2015

9780804794473 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804794077 Cloth $70.00 $56.00 sale

296 pages, 2014

9780804792646 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804788755 Cloth $80.00 $64.00 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

The Specter of
Capital
JOSEPH VOGL

In his brilliant interdisciplinary analysis of the global

financial crisis, Joseph Vogl
aims to demystify finance
capitalismwith its bewildering array of new instrumentsby tracing the historical stages through which the
financial market achieved its
current autonomy. Classical
and neoclassical economic
theorists have played a decisive role here. Ignoring early warnings about the instability
of speculative finance markets, they have persisted in their
belief in the inherent equilibrium of the market, describing
even major crises as mere aberrations or adjustments and
rationalizing dubious financial practices that escalate risk
while seeking to manage it.
The market knows best: this is a secular version of Adam
Smiths faith in the markets invisible hand, his economic
interpretation of eighteenth-century providentialist theodicy, which subsequently hardened into an oikodicy, an
unquestioning belief in the self-regulating beneficence of
market forces. Vogl shows that financial theory, assisted by
mathematical modeling and digital technology, itself operates
as a hidden hand, pushing economic reality into unknown
territory. He challenges economic theorists to move beyond
the neoclassical paradigm to discern the true contours of the
current epoch of financial convulsions.
To understand what capitalism means today, we must ask about economics and culture, for capital is central to each. It takes on spectral
form: shadowy, fleeting, but omnipresent. This is finance capitalism. It
has existed before but is of newly dramatic power now. Vogls book is
full of insights into what is going on and what it all means.
Craig Calhoun,
Director, London School of Economics and Political Science
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

168 pages, 2014

9780804792929 Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
9780804789042 Cloth $70.00 $56.00 sale

Spinoza Contra
Phenomenology

French Rationalism from Cavaills

to Deleuze
KNOX PEDEN

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology fundamentally recasts the history of postwar

French thought, typically presumed to
have been driven by a critique of reason
indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Although the reception of phenomenology gave rise to many innovative
developments in French philosophy,
from existentialism to deconstruction,
not everyone in France was pleased with
this German import. This book recounts
how a series of French philosophers
used Spinoza to erect a bulwark against
the nominally irrationalist tendencies
of phenomenology. From its beginnings
in the interwar years, this rationalism
would prove foundational for Althussers
rethinking of Marxism and Deleuzes
ambitious metaphysics. There has been
a renewed enthusiasm for Spinozism
of late by those who see his work as a
kind of neo-vitalism or philosophy of
life and affect. Peden counters this trend
by tracking a decisive and neglected
aspect of Spinozas philosophyhis
rationalismin a body of thought too
often presumed to have rejected reason.
In the process, he demonstrates that the
virtues of Spinozas rationalism have yet
to be exhausted.
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

384 pages, 1 figure, 2014

9780804791342 Paper $25.95 $20.76 sale
9780804787413 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Ethics in Economics

What Money Wants

Literature and the Creative

Economy

NOAM YURAN
WITH A PREFACE BY KEITH HART

SARAH BROUILLETTE

JONATHAN B. WIGHT

An Introduction to Moral
Frameworks
In Ethics in Economics , Jonathan B.
Wight provides an overview of the
role that ethical considerations play
in economic debates. Whereas much
of the field tends to focus on welfare
outcomes, Wight calls for a deeper
examination of the origin and evolution
of our moral norms. He argues that
economic life relies on three interrelated ethical systems: outcome-based,
duty- and rule-based, and virtue-based.
Wight provides a thorough and
accessible outline of all three schools,
explaining how they fit or contrast with
the economic welfare model, and then
uses these conceptual underpinnings to
examine a range of contemporary topics, such as the 2008 financial crisis, the
moral limits to markets, the findings
of experimental economics, and the
nature of economic justice. His analysis
is guided by the innovative concept
of ethical pluralismthe recognition
that each system has appropriate
applications, and that no one prevails.
This book is ideal for undergraduates
or uninitiated readers who seek an
introduction to this topic.
STANFORD ECONOMICS AND FINANCE

280 pages, 12 figures

9780804794534 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale
9780804793258 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

An Economy of Desire

One thing all mainstream economists

agree upon is that money has nothing
whatsoever to do with desire. This
strange blindness of the profession to
what is otherwise considered to be a
basic feature of economic life serves as
the starting point for this provocative
new theory of money. Through the
works of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen,
and Max Weber, What Money Wants
argues that money is first and foremost
an object of desire. Noam Yuran
explores the theoretical consequences
of the possibility that an ordinary
object fulfills moneys function insofar
as it is desired as money. Rich in colorful and accessible examples, from the
work of Charles Dickens to Reality TV
and commercials, this book convinces
us that we must return to Marx and
Veblen if we are to understand how
brand names, broadcast television, and
celebrity culture work. Analyzing both
classical and contemporary economic
theory, it reveals the philosophical
dimensions of the controversy between
orthodox and heterodox economics.
320 pages, 2014
9780804785938 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
9780804785921 Cloth $85.00 $68.00 sale

For nearly twenty years, social

scientists and policy makers have been
highly interested in the idea of the
creative economy. This book contends
that mainstream considerations of the
economic and social force of culture,
including theories of the creative class
and of cognitive and immaterial labor,
are indebted to historic conceptions of
the art of literary authorship. Whats
more, it shows how contemporary
literature has been involved in and has
responded to creative-economy phenomena, including the presentation of
artists as models of contentedly flexible
and self-managed work, the treatment
of training in and exposure to art as
a pathway to social inclusion, the use
of culture and cultural institutions to
increase property values, and support
for cultural diversity as a means of
growing cultural markets.
Taking a sociological approach to
literary criticism, Brouillette interprets
major works of contemporary fiction
by Monica Ali, Aravind Adiga, Daljit
Nagra, and Ian McEwan alongside
government policy, social science, and
theoretical explorations of creative
work and immaterial labor.
248 pages, 2014
9780804789486 Cloth $45.00 $36.00 sale

LITERATURE, CRITICISM,
AND LITERARY THEORY

Mother Folly
A Tale
FRANOISE DAVOINE
TRANSLATED BY
JUDITH G. MILLER WITH A
PREFACE BY MIEKE BAL

If your mentally ill patient

dies, are you to blame? For Dr.
Franoise Davoine, a Parisian
psychoanalyst, this question
becomes disturbingly real as
one of her patients commits
suicide. She herself has a
crisis, and questions whether
she should ever return to the
hospital. But return she does,
and she conjures up an interconnected world, where apiculture,
wondrous rituals, theater, and language games illuminate her
therapeutic practice as well as her personal history. Patients,
fools, and the actors of medieval farces rise up from the past
along with great thinkers who represent the authors own philosophical and literary sources: the humanist Erasmus, mathematician Ren Thom, writer Antonin Artaud, philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and physicist Edwin Schrdinger, to name a few.
Mother Folly is an important intervention in the debate about
how to treat the mentally ill, particularly those with psychosis. A practicing analyst and a skilled reader of literary and
philosophical texts, Davoine provides a humane antidote to our
increasingly mechanized and drug-reliant system of dealing
with fools and madmen.
Luminous, erudite, diabolically ironic, and wonderfully wild, Francoise
Davoines Mother Folly turns psychiatry on its head. Taking her lead
from that great satirical work by Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, Davoine
has created a hybrid text, which combines elements of fiction, theatrical
production, philosophical meditation, and narrative history to expose
the absurdities of contemporary platitudes about mental illness and its
treatment and to reveal the hidden truths of trauma and madness.
Siri Hustvedt
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

256 pages, 2014

9780804782784 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale
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NOW IN PAPER!

Better Left Unsaid

Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films,

and the Benefits of Censorship
NORA GILBERT

Better Left Unsaid is in the unseemly

position of defending censorship
from the central allegations that are
traditionally leveled against it. Taking
two genres generally presumed to
have been stymied by the censors
knifethe Victorian novel and classical Hollywood filmthis book reveals
the varied ways in which censorship,
for all its blustery self-righteousness,
can actually be good for sex, politics,
feminism, and art.
As much as Victorianism is equated
with such cultural impulses as repression and prudery, few scholars have
explored the Victorian novel as a
censored commoditythanks, in
large part, to the indirectness and intangibility of Englands literary censorship process. This indirection stands in
sharp contrast to the explicit, detailed
formality of Hollywoods infamous
Production Code of 1930. In comparing these two versions of censorship,
Nora Gilbert explores the paradoxical
effects of prohibitive practices. Rather
than being ruined by censorship,
Victorian novels and Hays Code films
were stirred and stimulated by the
very forces meant to restrain them.
THE CULTURAL LIVES OF LAW

200 pages, 13 illustrations, 2013

9780804795319 Paper $21.95 $17.56 sale

10

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

A Life with
Mary Shelley
BARBARA JOHNSON
EDITED BY JUDITH BUTLER AND
SHOSHANA FELMAN

American Terror

The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards,

Poe, and Melville
PAUL HURH

In 1980, deconstructive and

psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote
an essay on Mary Shelley for
a colloquium on the writings
of Jacques Derrida. The essay
marked the beginning of
Johnsons lifelong interest
in Shelley as well as her first
foray into the field of womens studies, one of whose commitments was the rediscovery
and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded
from the academic canon. It is surprising to recall that when
Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelleys novels were in
print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous
husbands. Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley
over the course of a brilliant career, and much of what we
know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her work.

If America is a nation founded upon

Enlightenment ideals, then why are
so many of its most celebrated pieces
of literature so dark? American Terror
returns to the question of American
literatures distinctive tone of terror through a close study of three
authorsJonathan Edwards, Edgar
In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have
Allan Poe, and Herman Melvillewho
united all of Johnsons published and unpublished work on
not only wrote works of terror, but who
Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism
defended, theorized, and championed
it. Combining updated historical
and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist
perspectives with close reading, Paul
theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth.
Hurh shows how these authors developed terror as a special literary affect
This animated book brings to life the very thing Mary Shelley could
informed by the way the concept of
herself hardly have imagined: the critical difference a supportive circle
thinking becomes, in the wake of
Enlightenment empiricism, increasingly of women writers can make.
defined by a set of austere mechanic
Diana Fuss, Los Angeles Review of Books
processes, such as the scientific method MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS
and the algebraic functions of analytical 232 pages, 2014
logic. Rather than trying to find a
9780804791250, Paper $22.95 $18.36 sale
feeling that would transcend thinking
9780804790529, Cloth $70.00 $56.00 sale
by subtending reason to emotion, these
writers found in terror the feeling of
thinking, the peculiar feeling of reasons
authority over emotional schemes.
336 pages, 2 illustrations, 2015
9780804791144 Cloth $60.00 $48.00 sale

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

11

The Collected Letters of

Robinson Jeffers, with
Selected Letters of Una
Jeffers

Volume Three, 19401962

EDITED BY JAMES KARMAN

This volume of correspondence, the

last in a three-volume edition, spans a
pivotal moment in American history:
the mid-twentieth century, from the
beginning of World War II, through
the years of rebuilding and uneasy
peace that followed, to the election of
President John F. Kennedy. Robinson
Jeffers published four important books
during this periodBe Angry at the
Sun (1941), Medea (1946), The Double
Axe (1948), and Hungerfield (1954). He
also faced changes to his hometown
village of Carmel, experienced the
rewards of being a successful dramatist
in the United States and abroad, and
endured the loss of his wife Una. Jeffers
letters, and those of Una written in
the decade prior to her death, offer a
vivid chronicle of the life and times of a
singular and visionary poet.
1024 pages, 43 illustrations, 2015
9780804794671 Cloth $95.00 $76.00 sale

Robinson Jeffers

Poet and Prophet

JAMES KARMAN

The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the California coast come alive in the poetry
of John Robinson Jeffers, an icon of
the environmental movement. In
this concise and accessible biography,
Jeffers scholar James Karman reveals
deep insights into this passionate
and complex figure and establishes
Jeffers as a leading American poet of
prophetic vision.
At the height of his popularity in
the 1920s and 1930s, Jeffers became
one of the few poets ever featured
on the cover of Time magazine, and
posthumously put on a U.S. postage
stamp. Writing by kerosene lamp in a
granite tower that he had built himself,
his vivid and descriptive poetry of the
coast evoked the difficulty and beauty
of the wild and inspired photographers
such as Edward Weston and Ansel
Adams. Inspiring later artists from
Charles Bukowski to Czesaw Miosz
and even the Beach Boys, Robinson
Jeffers contribution to American letters is skillfully brought back out of the
shadows of history in this compelling
biography of a complex man of poetic
genius who wrote so powerfully of the
astonishing beauty of nature.
192 pages, 19 illustrations, 2015
9780804789639 Paper $19.95 $15.96 sale

Tales of Futures Past

Anticipation and the Ends of

Literature in Contemporary China
PAOLA IOVENE

Most studies of Chinese literature

conflate the category of the future
with notions of progress and nation
building, and with the utopian visions
broadcast by the Maoist and post-Mao
developmental state. The future is
thus understood as a preconceived
endpoint that is propagated, at times
even imposed, by a center of power. By
contrast, Tales of Futures Past introduces anticipationthe expectations
that permeate life as it unfoldsas a
lens through which to reexamine the
textual, institutional, and experiential
aspects of Chinese literary culture from
the 1950s to 2011. In doing so, Paola
Iovene connects the emergence of new
literary genres with changing visions of
the future in contemporary China.
She provides a nuanced and dynamic
account of the relationship between
state discourses, market pressures,
and individual writers and texts, and
stresses authors and editors efforts to
redefine what constitutes literature under changing political and economic
circumstances. Iovene mines Chinese
science fiction and popular science,
puts forward a new interpretation of
familiar Chinese avant-garde fiction,
and offers close readings of texts that
have not yet received any attention in
English-language scholarship
240 pages, 5 figures, 2014
9780804789370 Cloth $45.00 $36.00 sale

12

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

Mark Twain in China

SELINA LAI-HENDERSON

The Stranger and the

Chinese Moral Imagination
HAIYAN LEE

In the last two decades, China has

become a dramatically more urban
society and hundreds of millions of
people have changed residence. Family and communal bonds have been
broken in a country once known as a
society of kith and kin. There has
been a pervasive sense of moral crisis
in contemporary China, and the new
market economy doesnt seem to offer
any solutions.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 18351910)

has had an intriguing
relationship with China that
is not as widely known as it
should be. Although he never
visited the country, he played
a significant role in speaking
for the Chinese people both
at home and abroad. After his
death, his Chinese adventures
did not come to an end, for
his body of works continued
to travel through China in
translation throughout the twentieth century. Were Twain alive
today, he would be elated to know that he is widely studied
and admired there, and that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
alone has gone through no less than ninety different Chinese
translations, traversing China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Looking at Twain in various Chinese contextshis response to
events involving the American Chinese community and to the
Chinese across the Pacific, his posthumous journey through
translation, and Chinas reception of the author and his work,
Mark Twain in China points to the repercussions of Twain in a
global theater. It highlights the cultural specificity of concepts
such as race, nation, and empire, and helps us rethink their
alternative legacies in countries with dramatically different
racial and cultural dynamics from the United States.

This book investigates how the Chinese

have coped with the condition of modernity in which strangers are routinely
thrust together. Haiyan Lee dismisses
the easy answers claiming that this
A fresh contribution to Mark Twain studies and to American literary
moral crisis is merely smoke and
studies, as well as to transnational American Studies, and cultural studmirrors conjured up by paternalistic,
overwrought leaders and scholars, or
ies more broadly, this groundbreaking book will pave the way for future
that it can be simply chalked up to the
investigations of the many approaches that the author opens up for us.
topsy-turvy of a market economy on
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University
steroids. Rather, Lee argues that the perception of crisis is itself symptomatic
184 pages, 11 illustrations, 2015
of a deeper problem that has roots in
9780804789646 Cloth $45.00 $36.00 sale
both the Confucian tradition of kinship
and the modern state management of
stranger sociality.
This ambitious work is the first to
investigate the figure of the stranger
foreigner, peasant migrant, bourgeois
intellectual, class enemy, unattached
woman, animalacross literature, film,
television, and museum culture.
376 pages, 13 illustrations, 3 figures, 2014
9780804785914 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

13

The Case of Mistress Mary

Hampson

Her Story of Marital Abuse and

Defiance in Seventeenth-Century
England
JESSICA L. MALAY

The centerpiece of The Case of Mistress

Mary Hampson is the autobiographical
narrative of a 17th-century woman
in an abusive and violent marriage.
Composed at a time when marital disharmony was in vogue with readers and
publishers, it stands out from comparable works, usually single broadsheets. In
her own words, Mary recounts various
dramatic and stressful episodes from
her decades-long marriage to Robert
Hampson and her strategies for dealing
with it. The harrowing tale contains
scenes of physical abuse, mob violence,
abandonment, flight, and destitution.
Mary wrote her story to come to terms
with her situation, to justify her actions,
and to cast herself in a virtuous light.
The accompanying discussion of her life,
drawn from other sources, provides
chilling evidence of the vulnerability of
seventeenth-century women and the
flawed legal mechanisms that were supposed to protect them. Malays archival
efforts have rescued a compelling and
complicated voice from the past.
176 pages, 7 figures, 2014
9780804790550 Paper $19.95 $15.96 sale
9780804786287 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

The Practice of Misuse

Poetic Force

RAYMOND MALEWITZ

This book argues that the theory of

force elaborated in Immanuel Kants
aesthetics (and in particular, his
theorization of the dynamic sublime)
is of decisive importance to poetry
in the nineteenth century and to the
connection between poetry and
philosophy over the last two centuries.
Inspired by his deep engagement with
the critical theory of Walter Benjamin,
who especially developed this Kantian
strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin
uses this theory of force to illuminate
the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in
their respective national traditions:
Friedrich Hlderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold. The result
is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory
and a fresh account of poetic language
and its aesthetic, ethical, and political
possibilities.

Rugged Consumerism in
Contemporary American Culture
In the age of Ikea Hackers and salvagepunks, this book charts the emergence
of rugged consumers who creatively
misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects
within their environments to suit their
idiosyncratic needs and desires. Figures
of both literary and material culture
whose behavior evokes an American
can-do ethic, rugged consumers mediate
between older mythic models of selfsufficiency and the consumption-driven
realities of our passive, post-industrial
economy. Through their unorthodox
encounters with the material world, rugged consumers show that using objects
properly is a conventional behavior that
must be renewed and reinforced rather
than a naturalized process that persists
untroubled through time and space.
At the same time, this Utopian ideal is
rarely met: most examples of rugged
consumerism conceal rather than foreground the ideological problems to which
they respond and thus support or ignore
rather than challenge the structures of
late capitalist consumerism. By analyzing
convergences and divergences between
subjective material practices and collectivist politics, Raymond Malewitz shows
how rugged consumerism both recodes
and reflects the dynamic social history
of objects in the United States from the
1960s to the present.
240 pages, 5 illustrations, 2014
9780804791960 Cloth $55.00 $44.00 sale

14

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

Poetry after Kant

KEVIN MCLAUGHLIN

MERIDIAN: CROSSING AESTHETICS

216 pages, 2014

9780804791007 Cloth $55.00 $44.00 sale

Out of Character

Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life

OMRI MOSES

Characters are those fictive beings

in novels whose coherent patterns of
behavior make them credible as people.
Character is also used to refer to the
capacityor incapacityof individuals
to sustain core principles. When characters are inconsistent, they risk coming
across as dangerous or immoral, not
to mention unconvincing. But what is
behind our cultures esteem for unwavering consistency? Out of Character
examines literary characters who defy
our cultures models of personal integrity.
It argues that modernist writers Henry
James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot
drew inspiration from vitalism as a way
of reinventing the means of depicting
people in fiction and poetry. Rather
than regarding a rigid character as
something that inoculates us against
the shifting tides of circumstance, these
writers insist on the ethical necessity
of forming improvisational, dynamic
social relationships. Charting the literary impact of William James, Charles
Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in
particular, Henri Bergson, this book
contends that vitalist understandings of
psychology, affect, and perception led to
new situational and relational definitions
of selfhood. As Moses demonstrates,
the modernists stirred by these
vital life lessons give us a sense of
what psychic life looks like at its most
intricate, complex, and unpredictable.
296 pages, 2014
9780804789141 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

NOW IN PAPER!

NOW IN PAPER!

What Is a Classic?

Why Literary Periods

Mattered

Postcolonial Rewriting and

Invention of the Canon
ANKHI MUKHERJEE

What Is a Classic? revisits the famous

question posed by critics from
Sainte-Beuve and T. S. Eliot to J. M.
Coetzee to ask how classics emanate
from postcolonial histories and
societies. Exploring definitive trends
in twentieth- and twenty-first century
English and Anglophone literature,
Ankhi Mukherjee demonstrates the
relevance of the question of the classic
for the global politics of identifying
and perpetuating so-called core texts.
Emergent canons are scrutinized in
the context of the wider cultural phenomena of book prizes, the translation
and distribution of world literatures,
and multimedia adaptations of world
classics. Throughout, Mukherjee
attunes traditional literary critical
concerns to the value contestations
mobilizing postcolonial and world
literature. The breadth of debates and
topics she addresses, as well as the
books ambitious historical schema,
which includes South Asia, Africa, the
Middle East, the West Indies, Australia,
New Zealand, Europe, and North
America, set this study apart from
related titles on the bookshelf today.
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

296 pages, 2013

9780804795258 Paper $24.95 $19.96 sale

Historical Contrast and the

Prestige of English Studies
TED UNDERWOOD

In the mid-nineteenth century, the

study of English literature began to
be divided into courses that surveyed
discrete periods. Since that time,
scholars definitions of literature and
their rationales for teaching it have
changed radically. But the periodized
structure of the curriculum has
remained oddly unshaken, as if the
exercise of contrasting one literary
period with another has an importance that transcends the content of
any individual course.
Why Literary Periods Mattered explains
how historical contrast became central
to literary study, and why it remained
institutionally central in spite of critical controversy about literature itself.
Organizing literary history around
contrast rather than causal continuity
helped literature departments separate
themselves from departments of
history. But critics long reliance on a
rhetoric of contrasted movements and
fateful turns has produced important
blind spots in the discipline. In the
twenty-first century, Underwood
argues, literary study may need digital
technology in particular to develop
new methods of reasoning about
gradual, continuous change.
216 pages, 2 illustrations 2013
9780804795265, paper $24.95 $19.96 sale

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

15

Flaubert Postsecular
Modernity Crossed Out
BARBARA VINKEN

By his national affiliation

and choice of genre, French
novelist Gustave Flaubert can
be considered emblematic of
modernity. This book showcases his specific and highly
refined imaginary as at once
unique and symptomatic of
an era. In particular, it contributes to the controversial
discussion of modernitys
relation to religion. At a time
when new religious fundamentalisms throughout the world
are on the rise, this has only become a more pressing issue.
Through this single acclaimed author, we realize that
modernity can only be understood in terms of its critical
rewriting of religious dogma. Strikingly, already in Flaubert,
this rewriting emerges in conjunction with questions of the
Orient and Orientalism. Flauberts Orient is an Other that is
always already within Western society. By highlighting the
complexity of the relation between religion, modernity, and
the Oriental, Barbara Vinkens discussion of these issues goes
beyond simple binaries. Her Flaubert Postsecular is a model
of scholarly research with far-reaching political implications.
This book is not only one of a handful of the best works to have come
out on Flaubert in a very long time; it is also, and in so many ways,
paradigmatic for literary studies today.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

Flaubert Postsecular opens up an entirely new perspective not only

onto Flaubert as an emblematic figure of literary modernity, but also
onto modernity itself. After Vinkens book, we will have to renegotiate
what it means to be absolutely modern.
Susanne Ldemann,
author of Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to
Jacques Derrida (2014)
CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE PRESENT

552 pages, 2015

9780804780643 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale
9780804780650 Paper $29.95 $23.96 sale

Jewish Pasts, German

Fictions

History, Memory, and Minority

Culture in Germany, 18241955
JONATHAN SKOLNIK

Jewish Pasts, German Fictions is the first

comprehensive study of how GermanJewish writers used images from the
Spanish-Jewish past to define their
place in German culture and society.
Jonathan Skolnik argues that Jewish
historical fiction was a form of cultural
memory that functioned as a parallel to
the modern, demythologizing project
of secular Jewish history writing.
What did it imply for a minority to
imagine its history in the majority
language? Skolnik makes the case
that the answer lies in the creation of
a German-Jewish minority culture
in which historical fiction played a
central role. After Hitlers rise to power
in 1933, Jewish writers and artists,
both in Nazi Germany and in exile,
employed images from the Sephardic
past to grapple with the nature of fascism, the predicament of exile, and the
destruction of European Jewry in the
Holocaust. Ultimately, Skolnik positions the Jewish embrace of German
culture not as an act of assimilation
but rather a reinvention of Jewish
identity and historical memory.
STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH
HISTORY AND CULTURE

280 pages, 17 illustrations, 2014

9780804786072 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

16

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

Sentimental Memorials

Women and the Novel in

Literary History
MELISSA SODEMAN

During the later eighteenth century,

changes in the meaning and status of
literature left popular sentimental novels
stranded on the margins of literary history. While critics no longer dismiss or
ignore these works, recent reassessments
have emphasized their interventions in
various political and cultural debates
rather than their literary significance.
Sentimental Memorials, by contrast,
argues that sentimental novels gave the
women who wrote them a means of
clarifying, protesting, and finally memorializing the historical conditions under
which they wrote. As women writers
successfully navigated the professional
marketplace but struggled to position
their works among more lasting literary
monuments, their novels reflect on what
the elevation of literature would mean
for womens literary reputations.
Drawing together the history of the
novel, womens literary history, and book
history, Melissa Sodeman revisits the
critical frameworks through which we
have understood the history of literature.
Novels by Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe,
Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson,
she argues, offer ways of rethinking
some of the signal literary developments
of this period, from emerging notions of
genius and originality to the rise of an
English canon.
200 pages, 2 illustrations, 2014
9780804780650 Paper $29.95 $23.96 sale
9780804791328 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale

NOW IN PAPER!

Thinking Its Presence

Form, Race, and Subjectivity

in Contemporary Asian
American Poetry

An Early Self

Jewish Belonging in Romance

Literature, 14991627
SUSANNE ZEPP

What role has Jewish intellectual culture

played in the development of modern
Romance literature? Susanne Zepp
When will American poetry and poetseeks to answer this question through
ics stop viewing poetry by racialized
an examination of five influential early
persons as a secondary subject within
modern texts written between 1499 and
the field? Dorothy J. Wang makes an
1627: Fernando de Rojass La Celestina,
impassioned case that now is the time.
Leone Ebreos Dialoghi damore, the
Thinking Its Presence calls for a radical
anonymous tale Lazarillo de Tormes
rethinking of how American poetry
(the first picaresque novel), Montaignes
is being read today, offering its own
Essais, and the poetical renditions of
reading as a roadmap.
the Bible by Joo Pinto Delgado. Forced
While focusing on the work of five
to straddle two cultures and religions,
contemporary Asian American
these Iberian conversos (Jews who
poetsLi-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin,
converted to Catholicism) prefigured
John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and
the subjectivity which would come to
Pamela Luthe book contends that aes- characterize modernity.
thetic forms are inseparable from social,
As New Christians in an intolerant
political, and historical contexts in the
writing and reception of all poetry. This world, these thinkers worked within
is the first sustained study of the formal the tensions of their historical context
to question norms and dogmas. Zepp
properties in Asian American poetry
interprets the changes that took place
across a range of aesthetic styles, from
in various literary genres and works of
traditional lyric to avant-garde. Wang
the period within the broader historical
argues with conviction that critics
context of the sixteenth and seventeenth
should read minority poetry with the
centuries, demonstrating the extent
same attention to language and form
to which the development of early
that they bring to their analyses of
modern subjective consciousness and
writing by white poets.
its expression in literary works can be
ASIAN AMERICA
explained in part as a universalization
416 pages, 2013
of originally Jewish experiences.
DOROTHY J. WANG

9780804795272 Paper $27.95 $22.36 sale

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH

HISTORY AND CULTURE

272 pages, 2 illustrations, 2014

9780804787451 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

LITERATURE, CRITICISM, AND LITERARY THEORY

17

The Miracle of
Analogy
or The History of
Photography, Part 1
KAJA SILVERMAN

The Miracle of Analogy is the

first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography.
It argues that photography
originates in what is seen,
rather than in the human
eye or the camera lens, and
that it is the worlds primary
way of revealing itself to us.
Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional
studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy.
This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph
analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated,
every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of
its digital offspring.
Photography is also unstoppably developmental, both at the
level of the individual image and of medium. The photograph
moves through time, in search of other kin, some of which
may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops
with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible
forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we
always seem to do, it goes elsewhere.
The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and
some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera
obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and
lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Key
figures discussed along the way include Nicphore Nipce,
Louis Daguerre, William Fox-Talbot, Jeff Wall, and Joan
Fontcuberta.
This is a lovely, intriguing book, powerfully argued, compellingly illustrateda major provocation. Challenging all the ways were so used to
thinking about photography, its richly textured counter-history invites
us to rethink the very meaning of the analogue in the contemporary
digital age.
Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto

240 pages, 95 illustrations, 2015

9780804793995 Paper $21.95 $17.56 sale
9780804793278 Cloth $65.00 $52.00 sale

18

ART AND FILM

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The Studios after the

Studios
Neoclassical Hollywood
(19702010)
J.D. CONNOR

Concerning the Spiritual

and the Concretein
Kandinskys Art
LISA FLORMAN

Modern Hollywood is
dominated by a handful of
studios: Columbia, Disney,
Fox, Paramount, Universal,
and Warner Bros. Threatened
by independents in the 1970s,
they returned to power in the
1980s, ruled unquestioned
in the 1990s, and in the new
millennium are again beseiged. But in the heyday of this
new classical era, the major studios movies their stories
and styles were astonishingly precise biographies of the
studios that made them. Movies became product placements
for their studios, advertising them to the industry, to their
employees, and to the public at large. If we want to know how
studios workhow studios thinkwe need to watch their
films closely. How closely? Maniacally so. In a wide range
of examples, The Studios after the Studios explores the gaps
between story and backstory in order to excavate the hidden
history of Hollywoods second great studio era.

This book examines the art and

writings of Wassily Kandinsky, who
is widely regarded as one of the first
artists to produce non-representational
paintings. Crucial to an understanding
of Kandinskys intentions is On the
Spiritual in Art, the celebrated essay he
published in 1911. Where most scholars
have taken its repeated references
Connor offers interpretations of key films from the 1970s and 80s
to spirit as signaling quasi-religious
or mystical concerns, Florman argues
that are often highly original and unexpected, making sure that The
instead that Kandinskys primary
Studios After the Studios has many thrilling moments of discovery
frame of reference was G.W.F. Hegels
(and
surprise). As an important contribution to film studies, it will
Aesthetics, in which art had similarly
be especially productive in re-opening the debate on Hollywood and
been presented as a vehicle for the
developing self-consciousness of spirit
authorship.
(or Geist, in German). In addition to
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam
close readings of Kandinskys writings,
POST*45
the book also includes a discussion of
384 pages, 73 illustrations, 2015
a 1936 essay on the artists paintings
written by his own nephew, philosopher 9780804790772 Cloth $50.00 $40.00 sale
Alexandre Kojve, the foremost Hegel
scholar in France at that time. It also
provides detailed analyses of individual
paintings by Kandinsky, demonstrating
how the development of his oeuvre
challenges Hegels views on modern art,
yet operates in much the same manner
as does Hegels philosophical system.
280 pages, 48 illustrations, 24 color images, 1 figure,
3 tables, 2014
9780804784849 Paper $25.95 $20.76 sale
9780804784832 Cloth $90.00 $72.00 sale

ART AND FILM

19

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