Angelic demons : the capricious creators -- Continuing the dance : how art therapy both reveals and mitigates violence and aggression.

A Meaning-Based Approach to Art Therapy contextualizes the phenomena of Holocaust artwork for the field of art therapy and uses this canon of artwork to support the inclusion of logotherapy into art therapy theory and practice. The author expounds on a study in which she interviewed surviving Holocaust artists about how they were able to create their artworks while in Nazi captivity. Divided into three parts, the book follows the chronological order of her inquiry. It first presents theory, then research, and ends with implications for the practice of art therapy. The research chapters set out the process and results of the author's phenomenological inquiry. They address how art making during the Holocaust allowed captive artists to bear witness, leave a legacy and retain their humanity. In the final part, the author reveals how art therapists can use concepts from her study to support the progress of their clients. She advocates for the application of logotherapy, an existential philosophy that emphasizes finding meaning to facilitate healing and personal growth. Practicing art therapists and students of art therapy will find this book to be an excellent resource on logotherapy, an updated perspective on existentialism, and a contemporary examination of phenomenology.

Self-expression is a fundamental human drive. The need for self-expression can occur through many means both creative and mundane. The Expressive Instinct explains how the complexity of human experiences and the need to express them manifests more profoundly when distilled into artforms and dispels the idea that creativity is the domain of a select gifted few. The book explores the questions: What is the purpose of art in our lives? Could the desire for beauty, to be surrounded by elements of nature, be an innate need? Are art and creative expression essential for a good life? In this book, Dr. Kaimal links over 10 years of research, theories of evolutionary biology, brain sciences, as well as her own lifelong journey as an artist, scholar and educator in many personal and professional roles (textile designer, art therapist, researcher and educator). This book makes the case for why we as human beings need to stay creative and not lose our abilities to channel our inner lives in adaptive expressive ways. The arts, the book argues, are a container for the range of human experiences. Creative expression helps us practice and externalize imagination which in turn helps build resilience for dealing with uncertainty and change.

Describing an outstanding example of the use of forensic art therapy in a criminal case, David Gussak, contracted by the defence to analyse the evidence in this instance, recounts his findings and presentation in court, as well as the future implications of his work for criminal proceedings.

This book examines representations of divine music to argue that visual arts could communicate the sound of divine music being depicted.

No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

The critical literary world has spent a wealth of thought and words on the question of Hawthorne himself: Where does he stand in his works? In history? In literary tradition? In this major new study, G. R. Thompson recasts the "Hawthorne question" to show how authorial presence in the writer's works is as much a matter of art as the writing itself. The Hawthorne who emerges from this masterful analysis is not, as has been supposed, identical to the provincial narrator of his early tales; instead he is revealed to be the skillful manipulator of that narrative voice, an author at an ironic distance from the tales he tells. By focusing on the provincial tales as they were originally conceived--as a narrative cycle--Thompson is able to recover intertextual references that reveal Hawthorne's preoccupation with framing strategies and variations on authorial presence. The author shows how Hawthorne deliberately constructs sentimental narratives, only to deconstruct them. Thompson's analysis provides a new aesthetic context for understanding the whole shape of Hawthorne's career as well as the narrative, ethical, and historical issues within individual works. Revisionary in its view of one of America's greatest authors, The Art of Authorial Presence also offers invaluable insight into the problems of narratology and historiography, ethics and psychology, romanticism and idealism, and the cultural myths of America.