Intervening in the multidisciplinary debate on emotion, Tropes of Transport offers a fresh analysis of Hegel’s work that becomes an important resource for Pahl’s cutting-edge theory of emotionality. If it is usually assumed that the sincerity of emotions and the force of affects depend on their immediacy, Pahl explores to what extent mediation—and therefore a certain degree of manipulation but also of sympathy—is constitutive of emotionality. Hegel serves as a particularly helpful interlocutor not only because he offers a sophisticated analysis of mediation, but also because, rather than locating emotion in the heart, he introduces impersonal tropes of transport, such as trembling, release, and shattering.

Richard C. Sha’s revealing study considers how science shaped notions of sexuality, reproduction, and gender in the Romantic period. Through careful and imaginative readings of various scientific texts, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and Longinus, and the works of such writers as William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Lord Byron, Sha explores the influence of contemporary aesthetics and biology on literary Romanticism. Revealing that ideas of sexuality during the Romantic era were much more fluid and undecided than they are often characterized in the existing scholarship, Sha’s innovative study complicates received claims concerning the shift from perversity to perversion in the nineteenth century. He observes that the questions of perversity—or purposelessness—became simultaneously critical in Kantian aesthetics, biological functionalism, and Romantic ideas of private and public sexuality. The Romantics, then, sought to reconceptualize sexual pleasure as deriving from mutuality rather than from the biological purpose of reproduction. At the nexus of Kantian aesthetics, literary analysis, and the history of medicine, Perverse Romanticism makes an important contribution to the study of sexuality in the long eighteenth century.

This book focuses on the interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that have proved influential over the past decades. Current readers of Hegel’s Phenomenology face an abundance of interpretive literature devoted to this difficult text and confront a plethora of different philosophical presuppositions, research strategies and hermeneutic efforts.To enable a better orientation within the interpretative landscape, the essays in this volume summarize, contextualize and critically comment on the issues and currents in contemporary Phenomenology scholarship. There is a common set of three questions that each of the contributions seeks to answer: (1) What kind of text is The Phenomenology of Spirit? (2) What do the different strategies of interpretation conceptually bring to the text? (3) How do different interpreters justify their verdict on whether the Phenomenology is still a viable project?

The contemporary urban experience is defined by flow and structured by circulating people, objects, and energy. Geographers have long provided key insights into transportation systems. But today, concerns for social justice and sustainability motivate new, critical approaches to mobilities. Reimagining the city prompts an important question: How best to rethink urban geographies of transport and mobility? This original book explores connections – in theory and practice – between transport geographies and "new mobilities" in the production of urban space. It provides a broad introduction to intersecting perspectives of urban geography, transport geography, and mobilities studies on urban "places of flows." Diverse, international, and leading-edge contributions reinterpret everyday intersections as nodes, urban corridors as links, cities and regions as networks, and the discourses and imaginaries that frame the politics and experiences of mobility. The chapters illuminate nearly all aspects of urban transport, from street regulation and roadway planning, intended and "subversive" practices of car and truck drivers, planning and promotion of mass transit investments, and the restructuring of freight and logistics networks. Together these offer a unique and important contribution for social scientists, planners, and others interested in the politics of the city on the move.

Border Crossings and Mobilities on Screen explores the movement, fluidity and change characterizing contemporary life, as represented on screen media, from mobile devices, to television, film, computers, video art and advertising displays. People have never moved around more, and increasingly migration and mobility has come to shape both our understandings of ourselves, and the ways in which we interpret and mediate the world we live in. As people move, media plays a key role in shaping and reshaping identity and belonging, opening the doors to transnational and transcultural participation. Drawing on screen media case studies from around the world, this book demonstrates how screen mobilities reconfigure notions of space, place, network and border regimes. The increasing ease of consumption and production of media has allowed for an unprecedented fluidity and mobility of class, gender, sexuality, nation and transnation, individual freedoms and aspirations. Putting people at the core of the book, this book shows the many ways in which people are using screen media to create identity, participation and meaning. The rich picture built up over the many chapters of this interdisciplinary volume raise important questions about the nature of contemporary media experiences. At a time of great change in the ways in which people move and connect with each other, this book provides an important global snapshot for researchers across the fields of media, communication and screen studies; sociology of communication; global studies and transnationalism; cultural studies; culture and identity; digital cultures; travel, tourism and place.

A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions. Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel. Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.

This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of many of the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions.