Rachel Rosenthal is an internationally recognised pioneer in the field of feminist and ecological performance art. Her revolutionary performance technique integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable theatre experience. In the last twenty years she has presented over thirty-five pieces nationally and internationally. She has been called 'a monument and a marvel' and critically ranked with Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Ping Chong, Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson. Her work is passionately dedicated to interrogating, illuminating and improving the relationship between human beings and the planet we share with so many other species. Her performances explore and embody the long history and urgent future of this deeply troubled relationship, and use viscerally compelling performance to draw us into a direct experience of the beauty and power of our lives in nature.

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene is a timely collection of insightful contributions that negotiate how the genre of life writing, traditionally tied to the human perspective and thus anthropocentric qua definition, can provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The volume’s eight chapters illustrate the aptness of life writing and life writing studies to critically reevaluate the role of “the human” vis-à-vis non-human others while remaining mindful of persisting inequalities between humans regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. The authors in this collection not only expand the toolbox of life writing studies by engaging with critical insights from the fields of posthumanism and ecocriticism, but, in turn, also enrich those fields by offering unique approaches to contemplate the responsibility of humans for as well as their relational existence in the posthuman Anthropocene.

Phenomenological analysis of beauty and art across various aspects of lived experience and culture. Through a careful analysis of concrete examples taken from everyday experience and culture, Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding develops a straightforward and powerful aesthetic methodology founded on a phenomenological approach to experience—one that investigates how consciousness engages with the world and thus what it means to take such things as tastes, images, sounds, and even a life itself as art. H. Peter Steeves begins by exploring what it means to see, and considers how disruptions of sight can help us rethink how perception works. Engaging the work of Derrida, Heidegger, and Husserl, he uses these insights about “seeing” to undertake a systematic phenomenological investigation of how we perceive and process a range of aesthetic objects, including the paintings of Arshile Gorky, the films of Michael Haneke, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, zombie films, The Simpsons, the performance art of Rachel Rosenthal and Andy Kaufman, and even vegan hot dogs. Refusing hierarchical distinctions between high and low art, Steeves argues that we must conceptualize the whole of human experience as aesthetic: art is lived, and living is an art. “This is a brilliant new contribution by our preeminent phenomenologist of culture. It’s extremely accessible, illuminating, original, and sophisticated while being philosophically probing.” — David Wood, author of The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West--beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"--Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

Numerous contemporary artists, particularly female artists, have chosen to examine the idealization of the female body. In this crucial book, Emily L. Newman focuses on a number of key themes including obesity, anorexia, bulimia, dieting, self-harm, and female body image. Many artists utilize their own bodies in their work, and in the act of trying to critique the diet industry, they also often become complicit, as they strive to lose weight themselves. Making art and engaging eating disorder communities (in real life and online) often work to perpetuate the illnesses of themselves or others. A core group of artists has worked to show bodies that are outside the norm, paralleling the rise of fat activism in the 1990s and 2000s. Interwoven throughout this inclusive study are related interdisciplinary concerns including sociology, popular culture, and feminism.

Includes, beginning Sept. 15, 1954 (and on the 15th of each month, Sept.-May) a special section: School library journal, ISSN 0000-0035, (called Junior libraries, 1954-May 1961). Also issued separately.