This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an "anthropology" of symbolic media generally. Central to the author's argument is the proposition that the idea of literature--at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century--as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media (in the term's broadest sense) and geared toward performativity and bodily experience. The author develops...