How does art influence us? In The Subject of Aesthetics, Tone Roald approaches aesthetics as a psychological discipline, showing how works of art challenge our habitual ways of perceiving the world. While aesthetics has traditionally been a philosophical discipline, Roald discusses how it is very much alive in the realm of psychology - a qualitative psychology of lived experience. But what actually constitutes an aesthetics of lived experience? The book answers that question by analyzing people's own engagement with visual art. What emerges is that the object of aesthetics is indeed...

In her new book Art and the Brain: Plasticity, Embodiment and the Unclosed Circle, Amy Ione offers a profound assessment of our ever-evolving view of the biological brain as it pertains to embodied human experience. She deftly takes the reader from Deep History into our current worldview by surveying the range of nascent responses to perception, thoughts and feelings that have bred paradigmatic changes and led to contemporary research modalities. Interweaving carefully chosen illustrations with the emerging ideas of brain function that define various time periods reinforces a...

"It's all rather confusing, really" was one of the catchphrases used by Spike Milligan in his ground-breaking radio comedy program The Goon Show. In a series of mock-epics broadcast over the course of a decade, Milligan treated listeners to a cosmology governed by confusion, contradictions, fluidity and uncertainty. In The Goon Show's universe, time and space expand and contract seemingly at will and without notice. The worldview featured in The Goon Show looked both backward and forward: backward, in the sense that it paralleled strategies used by schoolchildren to understand...

Explorations of Consciousness in Contemporary Fiction is a collection of essays examining the potential of the contemporary English-language novel to represent and inquire into various aspects of the human mind. Grounded in contemporary literary theory as well as consciousness studies, the essays consider both narrative techniques by means of which writers attempt to render various states of consciousness (such as multimodality in digital fiction or experimental typography in post-traumatic narratives), and novelistic interpretations of issues currently being investigated by neurobiologists,...

Art and Adaptability argues for a co-evolution of theory of mind and material/art culture. The book covers relevant areas from great ape intelligence, hominin evolution, Stone Age tools, Paleolithic culture and art forms, to neurobiology. We use material and art objects, whether painting or sculpture, to modify our own and other people’s thoughts so as to affect behavior. We don’t just make judgments about mental states; we create objects about which we make judgments in which mental states are inherent. Moreover, we make judgments about these objects to facilitate how we explore the...

Cityscapes of the Future: Urban Spaces in Science Fiction offers an examination of the central role played by urban spaces in science fictional narratives in various media forms from the literary to the ludic to the cinematic. Our contributors reflect on the ways diverse urban scenarios are central to the narratives’ science fictional imaginary and consider the pivotal roles cityscapes play in underscoring major thematic concerns, such as political struggles, social inequality and other cultural epistemologies. The chapters in the collection are divided into three sections examining the...

This anthology unites scholars from varied backgrounds with the notion that the theories and artistic productions of Bertolt Brecht are key missing links in bridging diverse discourses in social philosophy, theatre, consciousness studies, and aesthetics. It offers readers interdisciplinary perspectives that create unique dialogues between Brecht and important thinkers such as Althusser, Anders, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Godard, Marx, and Plato. While exploring salient topics such as consciousness, courage, ethics, political aesthetics, and representations of race and the body, it penetrates the...

Power’s Stoicism and Performance presents Stoicism as a means of navigating key debates and concepts in contemporary theatre and performance. Stoicism has influenced many of the most cited radical thinkers in the discipline of theatre and performance studies; for instance Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva, Agamben. A central aim of this work is to bring Stoicism more explicitly into the fold of the discipline, and to use Stoicism to think differently about performance. With a series of chapters covering themes such as performativity, embodiment, emotion, affect and spectatorship, this book finds...