Theory/Theatre provides a unique and engaging introduction to literary theory as it relates to theatre and performance. Fortier lucidly examines current theoretical approaches, from semiotics, poststructuralism, through cultural materialism, postcolonial studies and feminist theory. This new edition includes: * More detailed explanation of key ideas * New 'Putting it into practice' sections at the end of each chapter so you can approach performances from specific theoretical perspectives * Annotated further reading section and glossary. Theory/Theatre is still the only study of its kind and is invaluable reading for beginning students and scholars of performance studies.

    Addressing some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship, and narrative, Laura Mulvey here argues that such technologies, including home DVD players, have fundamentally altered our relationship to the movies. According to Mulvey, new media technologies give viewers the ability to control both image and story, so that movies meant to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be manipulated to contain unexpected and even unintended pleasures. The individual frame, the projected film’s best-kept secret, can now be revealed by anyone who hits pause. Easy access to repetition, slow motion, and the freeze-frame, Mulvey argues, may shift the spectator’s pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in film. By exploring how technology can give new life to old cinema, Death 24x a Second offers an original reevaluation of film’s history and its historical usefulness.

    L. King’s On the Down Low, Hung brings a topic previously discussed only in intimate settings out into the open. In a brilliant, multilayered look at the pervasive belief that African American men are prodigiously endowed, Scott Poulson-Bryant interweaves his own experiences as a black man in America with witty analyses of how black male sexuality is expressed in books, film, television, sports, and pornography.“Hung” is a double entendre, referring not only to penis size but to the fact that black men were once literally hung from trees, often for their perceived sexual prowess and the supposed risk it posed to white women. As a poignant reminder, he begins his book with a letter to Emmett Till, the teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in the mid-1950s for whistling at a white woman.For Poulson-Bryant and other men of his generation, society’s deep-seated obsession with the sexual powers of black men has had an enormous, if often deceptive, influence on how they perceive themselves and on the assumptions made by others. His tales of his sexual encounters with both sexes, along with anecdotes about the lives of various friends and colleagues, are wryly and at times shockingly revealing. Enduring racial perceptions have shaped popular culture as well, and Poulson-Bryant offers a thorough, thought-provoking look at media-created images of the “Well-Hung Black Male.” He deftly deconstructs movies like Mandingo and Shaft, articles in the popular press, and edgy works like Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book, while also providing distinctive profiles of icons like porn star Lexington Steele and rapper L.L. Cool J.A scintillating mixture of memoir and cultural commentary, Hung is the first and only book to take on phallic fixation and uncover what lies below. Readers may be scandalized, but they’ll also have plenty to ponder about America’s views on how black men measure up.

    Despite making up less than 1% of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarised 'debate', which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows. This media frenzy conceals a simple fact: that we are having the wrong conversation, a conversation in which trans people themselves are reduced to a talking point and denied a meaningful voice.In this powerful new book, Shon Faye reclaims the idea of the 'transgender issue' to uncover the reality of what it means to be trans in a transphobic society. In doing so, she provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system, and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.The Transgender Issue is a landmark work that signals the beginning of a new, healthier conversation about trans life. It is a manifesto for change, and a call for justice and solidarity between all marginalised people and minorities. Trans liberation, as Faye sees it, goes to the root of what our society is and what it could be; it offers the possibility of a more just, free and joyful world for all of us.

    In this new fifth edition of The Philosophy of Sex, Soble and co-editor Nicholas Power have collected thirty contemporary essays that explore philosophically, conceptually, and theologically the nature, social meanings, and morality of contemporary sexual phenomena. Contributors address myriad topics, including cybersex and the Internet, masturbation, contraception, sexual perversion, gay and lesbian sexuality, same-sex marriage, casual sex and promiscuity, pedophilia, rape and date rape, sexual use and objectification, sexual relationships between teachers and students, pornography, and prostitution. NEW to this edition: Each of the thirty essays is preceded by an informative introduction written by the two editors and each essay is followed by a set of provocative study questions developed by the editors to stimulate critical thinking about sexuality. Contributing authors, some of whom were commissioned for this new edition, include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Jerome Neu, Robin West, Louise Collins, Alan Wertheimer, Greta Christina, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Raja Halwani, Yolanda Estes, and others. The editors provide a comprehensive bibliography of over 700 philosophical and general readings in sexuality. Intended in part as a textbook for use in university courses in the philosophy of sex, gender, and ethics, the book is also a valuable resource for researchers in sexuality and a reader-friendly introduction to puzzles about sexuality for anyone who enjoys exploring this ubiquitous human experience.

    By treating poetry not as a special use of language but as a distinct language—unlike the one used in prose and conversation—Koch clarifies the nature of poetic inspiration, how poems are written and revised, and what happens to the heart and mind while reading a poem. Koch also provides a rich anthology of more than ninety works from poets past and present. Lyric poems, excerpts from long poems and poetic plays, poems in English, and poems in translation from Homer and Sappho to Lorca, Snyder, and Ashbery; each selection is accompanied by an explanatory note designed to complement and clarify the text and to put pleasure back into the experience of poetry.

    It just isn't very cool anymore. Enter Full Frontal Feminism, a book that embodies the forward-looking messages that author Jessica Valenti propagated as founder of the popular website, Feministing.com.This revised edition includes a new foreword by Valenti, reflecting upon what’s happened in the five years since Full Frontal Feminism was originally published. With new openers from Valenti in every chapter, the book covers a range of topics, including pop culture, health, reproductive rights, violence, education, relationships, and more.Chapters include:You’re a Hardcore Feminist. I Swear.Feminists Do It Better (and Other Sex Tips)Pop Culture Gone WildThe Blame (and Shame) GameIf These Uterine Walls Could TalkMy Big Fat Unnecessary Wedding and Other Dating Diseases“Real” Women Have BabiesI Promise I Won’t Say “Herstory”Boys Do CryBeauty CultSex and the City Voters, My AssValenti knows better than anyone that young women need a smart-ass book that deals with real-life issues in a style they can relate to. No rehashing the same old issues or belaboring where today's young women have gone wrong. Feminism should be something young women feel comfortable with. Full Frontal Feminism is sending out the message to readers—yeah, you're feminists, and that's actually pretty frigging cool.

    Carefully chosen selections from Frye, Benjamin, Lévi-Strauss, Lukács, Bakhtin, and other prominent theorists explore the historical significance of the novel as a genre, from its early beginnings to its modern variations in the postmodern novel and postcolonial novel.Offering a generous selection of key theoretical texts for students and scholars alike, Theory of the Novel also presents a provocative argument for studying the genre. In his introduction to the volume and in headnotes to each section, McKeon argues that genre theory and history provide the best approach to understanding the novel. All the selections in this anthology date from the twentieth century—most from the last forty years—and represent the attempts of different theorists, and different theoretical schools, to describe the historical stages of the genre's formal development.

    It connects the roles played by industry critics and audiences in making and re-making genre. In a critique of major voices in the history of genre theory from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, Altman reveals the conflicting stakes for which the genre game has been played. Recognizing that the very term "genre" has different meaning for different groups, he bases his genre theory on the uneasy competitive yet complimentary relationship among genre users and discusses a range of films from "The Great Train Robbery" to "Star Wars", and from "The Jazz Singer" to "The Player".

    The core of his argument in this essay (and in those that follow) lies in the old opposition between theoria and aesthesis - terms that embody, on the one hand, a linguistic, specifically rhetorical approach to literature and, on the other, a phenomenological, aesthetic, or hermeneutic approach - and all the implications those two modes carry with them. The resistance to theory, says de Man, is a resistance to the use of language about language; it is a resistance to reading, and a resistance to the rhetorical or figurative dimensions of language. The six related essays in The Resistance to Theory were written by de Man in the few years that preceded his death in December 1983. Undertaken to find out why the theoretical enterprise is blind to, or "resists," the radical nature of reading, the essays share not only a theme but also the pedagogical intent that is central to most of his work. These concerns, implicit in the title essay, are openly argued in "The Return to Philology." Each of the remaining essays is devoted to a specific theorist: Michael Riffaterre, Hans Robert Jauss, Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The Resistance to Theory also includes a 1983 interview with de Man conducted for Italian radio, and a complete bibliography of his work. Wlad Godzich's foreword tells how de Man's late work was conceived and organized for publication, and discusses some of the basic terms in his discourse."Indispensable. . . . There is resistance to 'theory' and also confusion about its status with reference to both philosophy and criticism. De Man's defense of theory is subtle but uncompromising, and highly personal in its 'aporetic' conclusion."- Frank Kermode, Columbia UniversityPaul de Man was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. His books include Blindness and Insight (1971; revised edition, Minnesota, 1983), Allegories of Reading ( 1980), and The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984).

    The authors integrate multicultural and multiethnic perspectives with high-interest features to engage all readers. For anyone wanting to learn more about human sexuality from a psychological, sociological, biological or health perspective.

    Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

    Through rereadings of Freud and Saussure, Agamben proposes a radical reconfiguration of the epistemological foundation of Western culture.

    With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Fiction of Worlds Outside-Science broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature. The text is followed by Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Billiard Ball.”

    of New York) gives an overview of organized feminism, its types, its approach to gender equality, and its theories and politics. She then offers a series of classic and new readings in gender reform feminism (liberal, Marxist, socialist, post-colonial), gender resistance (radical, lesbian, psychoanalytic, standpoint) and gender rebe