The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism (Series)

The body constructed by theory and through social and cultural practices has provided the departure point for studies that broach new fields and styles of inquiry. The aim of the series The Body, in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism was to reconstruct a history of materialisms (aesthetic, linguistic, and philosophical) by locating the body at the intersection of speculative and cultural formations across a wide range of contexts. The series is no longer accepting submissions.

Founding Editors
Dalia Judovitz
James I. Porter

Showing 1 to 14 of 14 results.

The Culture of the Body

Genealogies of Modernity

A cultural history of the evolution of the modern body, as glimpsed at six critical moments

The Limits of Heroism

Homer and the Ethics of Reading

Explores the relationship of desire to heroic ideology in both the Iliad and the Odyssey

Power and Knowledge

Astrology, Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire

Offers insight into the relationship between knowledge and power in ancient times--and science and politics in our own

Stately Bodies

Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender

Explores the curious prevalence of bodily metaphors in conceptions of noncorporeal institutions: the state, the law, and politics itself

Staging Masculinity

The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World

Examines ancient notions of what constitutes a "good man"

Cutting the Body

Representing Woman in Baudelaire's Poetry, Truffaut's Cinema, and Freud's Psychoanalysis

Explores the notion of the cut in poetry, film, and psychoanalysis and how it might be linked to male creativity

The Pedagogical Contract

The Economies of Teaching and Learning in the Ancient World

Rethinks the teacher-student relationship from its ancient roots to the present

An Utterly Dark Spot

Gaze and Body in Early Modern Philosophy

Two concepts of special interest to contemporary theorists--the gaze and the body--approached in a fresh and fascinating way

The Body and Physical Difference

Discourses of Disability

Groundbreaking perspectives on disability in culture and the arts that shed light on notions of identity and social marginality

The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World

An essay by philosopher Slavoj Zizek, with an English translation of Schelling's beautiful and evocative Ages of the World, second draft

The Subject as Action

Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics

Demonstrates the relation of narrative art to literary and philosophical speculations about human subjectivity

The Tremulous Private Body

Essays on Subjection

An ambitious study of literary, aesthetic, and philosophical authors on the modern subject versus the modern body