Gibbs presents a detailed exploration of classics such as Rebel Without a Cause and Lone Star. The book is an invaluable tool in understanding the expression of visual style, and an unrivalled text for the understanding of interpretative methodologies.

In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015, John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial “omni-speak” as unethical. This paper reads Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where “history is absurdity […] history is overlay”, Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely (...) sub-human. These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity. (shrink)

John Kinsella remains Australia’s most militant, morally cognizant naysayer, and his oeuvre is an archive of precepts running counter to master narratives of place. This essay re-reads Benjamin’s notion of the artist as cultural producer against the grain of Esposito’s etymological excavations of “community,” and frames Kinsella’s steady output of co-authored books as not only a mode of nomadic munificence but no less than a kind of formative guerrilla poetics. Pairing with poets, rock stars, others to extend his anti-capitalist (...) project, Kinsella’s co-authored works perform a suite of interventions, gifting readers a means by which we too might fathom the generative effects of banding together in a munus speaking its own laws to reconfigure notions of co-empowerment, equity, and indeed comradeship. Each of Kinsella’s co-authored books constitutes an intentional community of two and, as if dwelling in compositional possibilities, each text remains steadfastly optimistic. Refusing to be locked into despair by regressively instrumentalist political non-visionaries, from within an Antipodean milieu Kinsella and his many co-authors materialize gestures demonstrating how we might struggle for control of who gets to produce ideas, by which decentralized means, and to which generative ends. (shrink)

"Drawing upon recent work in theoretical archaeology, and on case studies from the prehistoric Near East, medieval Europe, early modern North America, and Mesoamerica, John Moreland challenges many of the assumptions which have hitherto underpinned archaeological research in historic periods, arguing that we will only fully understand these pasts when we begin to appreciate the historically specific ways in which both documents and artefacts were 'activated' in the reproduction and transformation of power and identity. A concluding chapter warns (...) that any contribution these arguments may make to the better understanding of the historical past will be negated if we fail to appreciate the very real dangers posed, to all the peoples of the past, by the recent 'linguistic turn' in both disciplines."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This work is intended as an approachable introduction aimed at students of archaeology, history or museum and heritage studies. Unlike most textbooks on heritage which discuss the creation of heritage as a cultural phenomenon or offer practical guides to heritage practices, it attempts to take a fresh approach by providing an introduction to themes in the field of heritage as it relates to the material legacy of our past.

Professors Murphy and Choi use postmodern philosophy to expose an important source of racism and cultural domination. The metaphysics of domination is examined, along with institutions based on this foundation which they regard as repressive. Postmodernism is shown to be useful in conceptualizing and implementing a pluralistic polity.

Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinize the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognize that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at the broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group. The book brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, (...) stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. (shrink)

In this book, first published in 1984, Joel Weinsheimer advocates revitalizing the practice of imitating literature as a mode appropriate for literary critics as well as artists. The book is not only about imitation; it is itself an imitation, specifically of Samuel Johnson. As both the focus and mode of presentation, imitation is presented not merely as a kind of poetry that once flourished in the eighteenth century but also as a kind of criticism particularly relevant today. Applying arguments from (...) philosophy of science, deconstruction, psycho-analysis, literary theory, semiotics and hermeneutics, Weinsheimer shows that the three main currents of thought responsible for forcing imitation underground were empiricism, originalism and historicism. The three central chapters of the book concentrate on their representatives: John Locke, Edward Young and Thomas Warton. The author then applies Johnsonian arguments – supported by those of Gadamer Peirce – to challenge those objections and re-establish imitation as an intellectually defensible mode of writing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR McDONOUGH Professor McDonough's response to my review of his book on the Tractatus consists of six main points. I will respond to them in sequence. First, Professor McDonough believes that I have ignored the central point of his hook: namely, the contention that the Tractatus embodies a philosophical argument built around certain " fundamental ideas." I have not done so, though an (...) ambiguity in his idea of what that argument is explains why he thinks that I have. By " the argument of the Tractatus " Professor McDonough may mean the pattern of remarks in the text concerning the non-representational status of logical con· stants, the idea that the sole logical constant is the general propositional form, and the idea that the tautological propositions of logic exhibit the framework of possibility for language and the world. In his interpretation of the links among these ideas Professor McDonough neither advances nor strays from the sorts of interpretations other commentators have offered. So in my review I dealt principally with the other side of the ambiguity, in which "the argument of the Tractatus " means an attempt, which Professor McDonough attributes to Wittgenstein, to establish a philosophical discourse about logic, the world, and mind, a discourse not covered by the injunction to silence. It is here that Professor McDonough's reading-as I think we both agree-is eccentric, and it was to this most interesting, though mis· taken, aspect of hi,s argument that I have directed my attention. Second, P1ofessor McDonough seems to suppose that I believe that the import of proposition 7 is that no one can consistently offer interpretative discourse about the Tractatus, and that I, in my remarks, seize special, unfair advantage by offering interpretation and then invoking silence. He charges that I " [make my] own interpretative claims " and that I ·then insist " (conveniently) that one must there· after he silent." By no means. It is only Wittgenstein (or one who endorses the Tractarian doctrines) who is open to a circumstantial ad hominem charge of inconsistency if he offers interpretations. For those of us who try to understand the Tractarian perspective without precisely sharing it, the question of consistency with proposition 7 is not an issue. What is an issue is construing Wittgenstein's doctrines in 327 328 JOHN CHURCHILL such a way that they are consistent with proposition 7. It is here that McDonough's reading is, as I have said, both most interesting and least convincing. Further, in suggesting that I have paid attention to the " conclusions " of his argument but not its substance, Professor McDonough does not do justice to the coherence of his own work. Those aspects of his interpretation to which much of my review is directed-for example, his interpretation of the thought as a " meaning locus "-are essential to the structure of his argument. By focusing my attention there I have shown, I believe, how these elements of his interpretation contribute to his central claim that the Tractatus is built around an argument. Third, he attributes to me the implausible idea that there is a " stand· ard interpretation of ' the plain sense of what Wittgenstein wrote ' " throughout the Tractatus. But I allude to a " plain sense " only in commenting on the injunction to silence about philosophy in proposi· tion 7. Of course there are many interpretative difficulties in the text. Professor McDonough supposes me to be denying that by ignoring the fact that, in the line he quotes from my review, I refer only to proposition 7 and to his attempt to interpret it. Fourth, Professor McDonough takes exception to my use of allusions to some of Wittgenstein's later works to illustrate shortcomings in his interpretation of the Tractatus.. He is quite right in detecting my own underlying assumptions of continuity throughout Wittgenstein's philosophical work. If space to articulate those assumptions was lacking in my review, it is scarcer here. I will simply say that one of the strongest continuities, the concern to see how philosophical inquiry comes to an end, is precisely the thing that Professor McDonough's " argument of the Tractatus " misconstrues. Fifth, Professor McDonough provides a list of seven points at which, he... (shrink)

I argue that we can interpret the stories told by near-death experiences in a naturalistic way. Thus, the profound significance of NDEs need not come from a supernaturalistic conception of them, according to which in an NDE the individual is in touch with a heavenly realm. We can respect the sincerity of NDE reports, but we can capture their meaning in a naturalistic framework.

This work identifies some of the masks worn by the sociopath, when he happens to be employed as a professor.

These and other examples of faculty misconduct -- and how to avoid them -- are the subject of this book.

This edited volume aims to gather philosophers, archaeologists, and psychologists/cognitive scientists working at the intersection of paleoanthropology, cognitive archaeology, psychology, and philosophy of mind and cognition. It is a result of the Sciences of the Origin project supported by the University of Oxford project ‘New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe’ funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Through photographs we preserve the past, and looking for the past is the very job of the archaeologist. But what are we looking at in an archaeological photograph? Archaeological photography is often largely deserted, to be scanned with a forensic gaze, towards finding evidence of what once took place. At the same time, photographs of excavated sites and artefacts have revealed stunning ancient works, shot as works of art. In Photography and Archaeology, Frederick Bohrer examines some of history’s most (...) famous archaeological excavations, as well as lesser-known and previously unpublished finds, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and the ways these sites have been represented in photographs. Bohrer shows how the development of photography in the nineteenth century made archaeology available to a much wider audience, and he discusses how these images revealed the material traces of the past, as well as their meaning and use today. Spanning the dual histories of both photography and archaeology, the book makes evident how what we know of the archaeological past has always been related to how it has been photographically represented and circulated: in scholarly papers, popular accounts, scientific archives, museum catalogues and numerous other formats. Bohrer concludes that such images possess contending, if not mutually exclusive, properties. While photography seems to guarantee documentary objectivity, at the same time it also fundamentally alters the archaeological object, transforming it into a work of art. Along the way, he discusses archaeological examples and images by photographers including Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, John Beazley Greene, Ernst Herzfeld and others, to more contemporary photographers such as Aaron Levin, Roger Wood and Marilyn Bridges. Beautifully illustrated with fine archaeological images, many published here for the first time, Photography and Archaeologywill be of interest to archaeologists, art historians and photographers, as well as anyone concerned with, or captivated by, archaeology’s ongoing engagement with the past. (shrink)

Broken bodies, places and objects demonstrates the breadth of fragmentation and fragment use in prehistory and history, and provides an up-to-date insight into the current archaeological thinking around the topic. A seal broken and shared by two trade parties, dog jaws accompanying the dead in Mesolithic burials, fragments of ancient warships commodified as souvenirs, parts of an ancient dynastic throne split up between different colonial collections... Pieces of the past are everywhere around us. Fragments have a special potential precisely because (...) of their incomplete format - as a new matter that can reference its original whole but can also live on with new, unrelated meanings. Deliberate breakage of bodies, places and objects for the use of fragments has been attested from all time periods of the past. It has now been over 20 years since John Chapman's major publication introducing fragmentation studies, and the topic is more present than ever in archaeology. This volume offers the first European-wide review of the concept of fragmentation, collecting case studies from the Neolithic to the Modern, and extending the ideas of fragmentation theory into new directions. The book is written for scholars and students in archaeology but it is also relevant for neighbouring fields taking an interest in material culture, such as anthropology, history, cultural heritage studies, museology, art and architecture. (shrink)

Since the publication in 1975 of Paul Virilio's Bunker Archeology, the range of Virilio's critical works and their impact have now become clear within a variety of subjects. Making astonishing interventions into art and architecture, geography, cultural studies, media, literature, aesthetics and sociology, the momentous implications of which have yet to be entirely understood, Virilio is the cultural theorist for our troubled twenty-first century. Responding to this growing interdisciplinary interest, Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies comprises Sean Cubitt's critical (...) overview of Virilio's aesthetics of disappearance, an important newly translated text by Virilio interrogating the impact of contemporary art, and eight other major original essays by noted scholars on the wide scope of Virilio's writings, inclusive of Adam Sharr on Virilio and the architect Peter Zumthor's Bruder Klaus chapel, and Nigel Thrift's crucial assessment of Virilio's City of Panic. Substantial coverage of Virilio's essential texts such as The Information Bomb is presented alongside his hypermodern conjectures on television and speed, globalization, media and representation. Navigating Virilio's 'accident of art', the 'aesthetics of disappearance' and widespread cultural devastation, additional essays bring together considerations of financial adversity, war, calamity and the apocalypse. Dazzling yet perceptive, these texts on the 'post-nuclear imagination', terror and dread are simultaneously creative and theoretical extrapolations from Virilio's 'scenic imagination' and companion essays to his most contemporary, highly original and powerful books such as The Original Accident and The University of Disaster. Clearly introduced by the editor, Virilio Now is the preeminent single volume on Virilio's work and world available today."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural MarxismPaul Allen Miller (bio)Jameson, Fredric. Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Ed. Ian Buchanan. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 296 pp.Fredric Jameson may well be the greatest intellectual produced by the United States in the last half century. It is difficult to think of anyone else who has made as many, as lasting, and as wide-ranging contributions as Jameson. From his (...) early work on Sartre’s style, passing through the twin opera on dialectical theory (Marxism and Form) and formalism and structuralism (Prisonhouse of Language), and the idiosyncratic appreciation of Wyndham Lewis (Fables of Aggression) to that summa of Marxist hermeneutics, The Political Unconscious, and from his major collection of essays, The Ideologies of Theory, through his books on Adorno (Late Marxism) and film (Signatures of the Visible), to that foundational text on postmodern literature, theory, art, and architecture, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and the late work on world cinema (The Geopolitical Aesthetic), utopianism (The Seeds of Time), Brecht (Brecht and Method), modernity (A Singular Modernity), and science fiction (Archaeologies of the Future), Jameson’s career is unparalleled in the American letters. It is perhaps not coincidental, either, that this larger-than-life figure on the intellectual stage ranging easily from Russian formalism to Deleuzean antihumanism, from Balzac to Frank Gehry, and from Hegel to Derrida, is an intellectual dissident. Contemporary American life’s alternation between uncritical consumerism (Marcuse’s one-dimensional man) and nonothing anti-intellectualism (Christian fundamentalism and corporate-fueled jingoism) could only produce such a body of work as an alien presence: its own systemic negation and thus the fullest expression of its deepest internal contradictions. The present collection of interviews from 1981 to the present, then, stands as a welcome commentary on Jameson’s vast work and an important reflection of the changes in American intellectual life in the period from the last days of the Cold War to the end of the second Bush administration.Naturally, as with any collection of interviews, not every thing is new here. Indeed, to the seasoned reader of Jameson, much of this is familiar territory, and there is a fair amount of repetition from one interview to the next (Goethe’s concept of “world literature,” for example, is a recurring motif). Nonetheless, there are many moments of real insight and bold commentary that remind us why Marxism is far from dead and how Jameson has achieved an iconic status rivaling that of Lukacs, Althusser, or Eagleton, as one of the preeminent Marxist thinkers of the last century. Many of these come in the form of vignettes, little snippets of cultural analysis. One such comes in Jameson’s interview with Columbia University Professor of History Anders Stephanson. Here Stephanson asks Jameson to comment on the recent architectural and cultural phenomenon of creating ersatz public spaces. These come in the form of commercial areas that present themselves in guise of “squares,” “plazas,” or “villages.” They make reference to and pastiche traditional forms of life and then re-represent them in the form of a hypercapitalist consumerism. These simulacra of less alienated, precapitalist forms of [End Page 65] life are then presented as depthless surfaces, parodies of authenticity. The archetype of such ersatz public spaces is Disney’s EPCOT:Stephanson: In other words, you are referring to his compressed version of the world; little toy countries where you can orient yourself in no time at all.Jameson: I suppose you can orient yourself because walking paths are available. But where you actually are is a real problem, for you may in fact be in the Florida Everglades, and in this case you are not only in a swamp but also in a simulacrum of a different geographical complex altogether. Disneyland is, on the whole, supremely prophetic and paradigmatic of these multiple shifting and dissolving spatial levels. (49)This is both an insightful observation and a wonderful example of Jameson’s dialectic at work. One moment we’re walking hand in hand with Goofy round the little, fake Eiffel Tower of EPCOT and the next we sink into the morass that paved the Everglades, acquired control... (shrink)

This Article invites Professor Henry Veatch to consider some of Finnis' previous work. Finnis asserts that his work presents "serious questions" for those who interpret Aristotle and Acquinas in the way the Veatch does and invites Veatch to respond.

Di Giovanni’s review of my On Hegel’s Logic in the September 1982 number of The Owl of Minerva fulfilled its own prediction. By responding to my thesis concerning the logic, he transformed my monologue into “an instructive debate on what the nature and value of the Hegelian Logic truly are.” After a thorough and carefully analysis of my “meta-logical” introduction and conclusion, he raises a central question concerning my interpretation of the logic: whether in fact I have fallen prey to (...) psychologism. In accordance with the traditions of debating, his challenge deserves a considered rebuttal. (shrink)

Consider a familiar case. A sign reads, “No vehicles in the park.” A man in the park has a heart attack. An ambulance is needed. Does its entry violate the rule? Most people would say that the rule was not meant to apply to needed ambulances. It would not make any difference if the rule read, “No vehicles whatsoever in the park.” The purpose of any rule against vehicles would not be served by a flat prohibition of ambulances. Consider a (...) second case. A child comes to the park on a tricycle. Is he barred from entering? A tricycle is a vehicle. But is it the kind of vehicle the author of the sign had in mind? He may only have wanted to preserve the park from fast or noisy vehicles. The purpose of the rule again becomes crucial. Is the purpose to maintain quiet and security, or is the purpose to assure absolute tranquility? The prohibition of the tricycle will depend on what purpose is accepted. (shrink)

No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism draws critically on the full range of the writings of William James--his psychology, theory of belief and truth, radical empiricism, pluralism, and his accounts of religion, ethics, politics, and society-to develop a powerful case for an original pragmatic world view and temperament resonant with James's philosophy. In a manner that avoids the "vicious intellectualism" that James criticized, the book engages more than a century of scholarship on (...) James, and places him in conversation with both his contemporaries and more recent writers. Throughout the book's seven interwoven chapters, the author moves both with James and at times against James to address and illuminate central issues about the nature of the self, freedom, morality, community, truth, reality, and possibility. The chapters take up, in turn, James's views on: faith and freedom; habit, attention, and flourishing; inclusive and ethical lives; democratic politics; the temperament of pragmatism; a radically empirical ontology of relations; and, a pluralistic and unfinished universe. The focus throughout is practical: the book aims to show the differences in concrete lives that it makes to take up a broadly Jamesian pragmatic, radically empirical, and pluralistic personal perspective across the fallible and "ever not quite" endeavours of our finite lives. "From this unsparing practical ordeal," James noted, "no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In this spirit, this book does not pretend to provide, by itself, salvation. Instead, it effectively develops insights in the writings of William James that continue to constitute invaluable resources for new problems, new possibilities, and new forms of personal and social life. (shrink)

In his “Theology and Falsification” Professor Antony Flew challenges the sophisticated religious believer to state under what conceivable occurrences he would concede that there really is no God Who loves mankind: ‘Just what would have to happen not merely to tempt but also, logically and rightly, to entitle us to say “God does not love us” or even “God does not exist”? I therefore put…the simple central questions, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for (...) you a disproof of the love of, or of the existence of, God”?’. (shrink)