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This volume offers a critical re-assessment of the thought of Ernst Bloch, best-known for his groundbreaking study The Principle of Hope and one of the most significant European thinkers and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. It explores Bloch’s life, work and reception; his debt to Marx and Hegel; his central concepts of hope and utopia; his affinities with philosophers such as Gramsci and Žižek; and his radical reframing of our understanding of history, society and culture. Above all, this volume examines the relevance of Bloch’s ideas today, in a world still shot through with economic inequality and social injustice.

Contributors are: Agata Bielik-Robson, Ivan Boldyrev, Henk de Berg, Sam Dolbear, Vincent Geoghegan, Holger Glinka, Loren Goldman, Douglas Kellner, Cat Moir, Jan Rehmann, Nina Rismal, Johan Siebers, and Peter Thompson
Sports Semiotics applies semiotics (and other disciplines, secondarily) to analyse the social, cultural, economic and psychological significance of sports. It includes a primer on semiotic theory, sections on the analysis of wrestling by Roland Barthes in his book Mythologies, as well as sections on football and the sacred, the Super Bowl, and the semiotics of televised baseball.
Equine Medicine and Popular Romance in Late Medieval England explores a seldom-studied trove of English veterinary manuals, illuminating how the daily care of horses they describe reshapes our understanding of equine representation in the popular romance of late medieval England. A saint removes a horse’s leg the more easily to shoe him; a wild horse transforms spur wounds into the self-healing practice of bleeding; a messenger calculates time through his horse’s body. Such are the rich and conflicted visions of horse/human connection in the period. Exploring this imagined relation, Francine McGregor reveals a cultural undercurrent in which medieval England is so reliant on equine bodies that human anxieties, desires, and very orientation in daily life are often figured through them. This book illuminates the complex and contradictory yearnings shaping medieval perceptions of the horse, the self, and the identities born of their affinity.
Often identified as one of the most genuine and enduring American film genres, the road movie has never been explored in the context of experimental filmmaking. To fill this gap, Lost Highways, Embodied Travels provides the first book-length study of over eighty unique and often obscure films and videos and situates them within the corporeal turn in American avant-garde cinema, so far mostly associated with body genres and sexually explicit films. Drawing on unpublished archival materials, the book offers a fresh take on both past and current practices of the experimental film community for scholars, students, makers and film buffs.
In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation. Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.
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Film festivals around the world are in the business of making experiences for audiences, elites, industry, professionals, and even future cultural workers. Cinema and the Festivalization of Capitalism explains why these non-profit organizations work as they do: by attracting people who work for free, while appealing to businesses and policymakers as a cheap means to illuminate the creative city and draw attention to film art. Ann Vogel’s unprecedented systematic sociological analysis thus provides firm evidence for the ‘festival effect’, which situates the festival as a key intermediary in cinema value chains, yet also demonstrates the impact of such event culture on cultural workers’ lives. By probing the various resources and institutional pillars ensuring that the festivalization of capitalism is here to stay, Vogel urges us to think critically about publicly displayed benevolence in the context of cinema—and beyond.