Editions Rodopi
Aesthetic experience; beauty, creativity and the search for the ideal.
Hagman, a psychoanalytic social worker, argues that every aspect of experience has an aesthetic dimension and that that dimension is optimally elaborated and refined through life. He emphasizes the central role of relatedness and intersubjectivity in aesthetic experience and in the creative process. Emphasizing the form rather than the content of an individual's aesthetic experience, he develops a model which he then applies to several philosophical problems. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
How far is America from here?; proceedings.
These papers were first presented at the first World Congress of the International American Studies Association held in 2003. The articles interrogate the notions of "America," locality and identity and consider the multiple Americas within the US and the bi-continental western hemisphere. The topics vary as widely as the definitions of America itself. They include America's role in globalization, geographical exploration; capital expansion; integration; transculturalism; pre-Columbian and Native American cultures; American exceptionalism; the discourse of terrorism; and the literary representation of American cities. Several contributors also discuss the current state of American Studies itself. The volume lacks an index. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Intercultural explorations; proceedings.
Proceedings from an August 1997 international conference held in Leiden, The Netherlands, exploring the role literature plays as a repository of culture. Twenty-four contributions are organized into sections on Asian-Western intersections, intercultural memory, intercultural perspectives on women, and genre studies. Five of the 24 papers are in French; the remaining 19 are in English. A sampling of topics: Asian subjectivity and multiculturalism, literary aesthetics East and West, Japonism in art — the case of James McNeil Whistler, Hongmo (Red Hair, the Netherlands) in Korean literature, cultural memory in literary history — the case of a "new" South Africa, Arab writers and women's liberation, the possibility of heroic epic in Korean classic literature, and the literary appropriation of Japanese oral storytelling. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Orientations; space, time, image, word; word & image interactions; 5.
Based on papers presented at the Fifth Triennial Conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies held in 2002 in Hamburg, the 22 essays cover a variety of media, from medieval architecture to interactive digital art. The papers are organized around the themes of history and identity, cultural memory, texts and photographs, mixed-media texts, intermedia texts, and space, spatialization and virtual space. The contributors, who represent various disciplines from Europe, the US and South America, discuss such topics as symbolism and identity in Whistler and Hitchcock; cartographic strategies in contemporary fiction; and the shift from university seals to university logos. The papers in French have not been translated into English. (Annotation ©2006 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)