"This book collects fourteen essays by the woefully understudied Carl Einstein, translated here from the German. Einstein was a major critic in the early twentieth century. He was a large presence in Paris when it was the crucible of the modernist avant-garde. He was one of the earliest thinkers to take Cubism seriously. He was an architect of formalism and perhaps the first critic to produce a substantial text on African art and its relationship to modernism that rejected Sub-Saharan African cultures as "primitive." And, his views on repetition and mechanical reproduction are in direct opposition to those of Walter Benjamin. Charles Haxthausen identified and translated these fourteen essential texts and has provided critical introductions to each one as well as a longer introduction to Einstein's life, work, and contribution to the intellectual culture of the 20th century"--

The German art historian and critic Carl Einstein (1885-1940) was at the forefront of the modernist movement that defined the twentieth century. One of the most prolific and brilliant early commentators on cubism, he was also among the first authors to assess African sculpture as art. Yet his writings remain relatively little known in the Anglophone world. With A Mythology of Forms, the first representative collection of Einstein’s art theory and criticism to appear in English translation, Charles W. Haxthausen fills this gap. Spanning three decades, it assembles the most important of Einstein’s writings on the art that was central to his critical project—on cubism, surrealism, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Paul Klee, and includes the full texts of his two pathbreaking books on African art, Negro Sculpture (1915) and African Sculpture (1921). With fourteen texts by Einstein, each presented with extensive commentary, A Mythology of Forms will bring a pivotal voice in the history of modern art into English.

From the ancient Greeks to the Aztecs, people across the world have created a rich tapestry of stories, characters, and beliefs to explain the mysteries of creation and the forces of nature and death. Mythology of the World examines both ancient and contemporary cultures and explores their unique myths and legends, carrying every myth across centuries to today's readers. Mythology of the World's sparkling, readable text covers more than fifty myths from Europe, Asia, America, Africa, Australia, and Oceania. It includes a directory of gods, humans, monsters, and animals.

"The text is at once a meditation on theories of form and an essay on the painter Gerhard Richter as a philosophical pragmatist. Richter serves as the inspiration for a broader argument about the nature of "art" itself and for what Klinger professes to be a fresh approach to contemporary art more generally. He (1) addresses the widely conceded exhaustion of the modernist-postmodernist paradigm that has been used to negotiate the "essence of art" for decades and (2) offers what he says is a solution to the resulting gap that leaves us unclear on how to make art and talk about it. He draws on Kuhn's definition that a paradigm consists of the pre-theoretical framework of any practice: While rules and principles, where they exist, grow out of the paradigm, the paradigm can guarantee the functioning of a practice in the absence of rules. He sees Richter as relevant because the painter has never accepted the modern, neo-avant-garde, or postmodern movements as paradigms for his production. Klinger maintains that the goal of Richter's artistic program is "to replace traditional essentialist models of artistic form by a pragmatic model" of respecting the properties of actual physical substances at hand, such as paint, and making art in terms of process rather than with a prescribed end. This way, the modernist-postmodernist paradigm is neither affirmed nor perpetuated in the mode of its reversal, critique or deconstruction, but replaced by something else that forms an effective reaction to the situation without directly deriving from it"--

Exploring a prominent digital mythology, this book proposes a new way of viewing both online narratives and the online communities which tell them. The Slender Man – a monster known for making children disappear and causing violent deaths to the adults who seek to know more about him – is used as an extended case study to explore the role of digital communities, as well as the question of the existence of a broader “digital culture”. Structural anthropological mythic analysis and ethnographic details demonstrate how the Slender Man mythology is structured, and how its everlasting nature in the online communities demonstrates an importance of the mythos.

The Symbolic Forms has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone (apart from Cassirer’s other papers and books) make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, Nature