Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars
Taking the reader on an inward journey from facades to closets, from physical to psychic space, Architectural Involutions offers an alternative genealogy of theater by revealing how innovations in architectural writing and practice transformed an early modern sense of interiority. The book launches from a matrix of related platforms a term that in early modern usage denoted scaffolds, stages, and draftsmen s sketches to situate Alberti, Shakespeare, Jonson, and others within a landscape of spatial and visual change....

In Violence and Grace, Nichole Miller establishes a conceptual link between early modern English drama and twentieth-century political theology, both of which emerge from the experience of political crisis. Even as philosophers from Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin to Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil drew upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic representations of the nation-state to analyze the political phenomena of late modernity, Miller contends that they effaced the gendered and sexual dimensions of power and "exceptional life" so crucial to these plays....

While scholars have chronicled Czes aw Mi osz s engagement with religious belief, no previous book-length treatment has focused on his struggles with theodicy in both poetry and thought. Mi osz wrestled with the problem of believing in a just God given the powerful evidence to the contrary in the natural world as he observed it and in the horrors of World War II and its aftermath in Poland. Rather than attempt to survey Mi osz s vast oeuvre, ukasz Tischner focuses on several key works "The Land of Ulro," "The World," "The Issa Valley," "A Treatise on Morals," "A Treatise on Poetry," and...

The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what...

The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what...

Winner of the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars

Taking the reader on an inward journey from facades to closets, from physical to psychic space, Architectural Involutions offers an alternative genealogy of theater by revealing how innovations in architectural writing and practice transformed an early modern sense of interiority. The book launches from a matrix of related "platforms"--a term that in early modern usage denoted scaffolds, stages, and draftsmen's sketches--to situate Alberti, Shakespeare, Jonson, and others within a landscape of spatial and visual...