Since its publication in 1936, Walter Benjamin's -Artwork- essay has become a canonical text about the status and place of the fine arts in modern mass culture. Benjamin was especially concerned with the ability of new technologies-notably film, sound recording, and photography-to reproduce works of art in great number. Benjamin could not have foreseen the explosion of imagery and media that has occurred during the past fifty years. Does Benjamin's famous essay still speak to this new situation? That is the question posed by the editors of this book to a wide range of leading scholars and...

References to language abound in the sciences: biologists speak about -reading- the human genome and -rewriting- the genetic code, computer scientists develop -programming language, - and mathematicians seek a -universal symbolic language.- What is behind these references to language, and what do they say about how science actually works? This concise but ambitious volume brings together leading scholars in the history of science to address these questions from a variety of perspectives: the historical, methodological, and ideological motivations behind scientists' use of language metaphors....

Before Gertrude Stein became the twentieth century's preeminent experimental writer, she spent a decade conducting research in both the leading psychological laboratory and the leading medical school in the United States. This book unearths the turn-of-the-century scientific and philosophical worlds in which the young Stein was immersed, demonstrating how her extensive scientific training continued to exert a profound influence on the development of her extraordinary literary practices. As an undergraduate, Stein worked with the philosopher William James and the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg...