This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects. Written by leading philosophers, psychologists, literary scholars and semioticians, the book addresses two intertwined issues. The first is related to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience: The understanding of how human beings respond to artworks, how we process l...
When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media - music, videos, games, and software - before their official sale date and then racing against one another to rele...
This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial I...
This book provides a compendium of material properties, demonstrates several successful examples of bio-based materials' application in building facades, and offers ideas for new designs and novel solutions. It features a state-of-the-art review, addresses the latest trends in material selection, assembling systems, and innovative functions of...
Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime discusses the relationship between the novel and architecture during the Fascist period in Italy (1922-1943). By looking at two profoundly diverse aesthetic phenomena within the context of the creation of a Fascist State art, Billiani and Pennacchietti argue that an effort of construction,...
Lifestyle in Siberia and the Russian North breaks new ground by exploring the concept of lifestyle from a distinctly anthropological perspective. Showcasing the collective work of ten experienced scholars in the field, the book goes beyond concepts of tradition that have often been the focus of previous research, to explain how political, economic ...
This book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, ...
Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide ra...
While the idea of women who stay at home and men who dominate the streets may seem outdated, binary considerations of gender, space, and power still proliferate in contemporary cinema. This open access book adopts a fluid approach to space designed to accommodate wilful, affirmative, and imaginative perspectives of gender on screen. Through close a...
This open book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. It discusses the cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks (focusing on food), proprioceptive artworks (dance, martial arts, and rock climbing qua proprioceptive experiences), intellectual artworks (philosophical and scientific theories), as well as the vague limits between pain...
The histories of East and West Germany traditionally emphasize the Cold War rivalries between the communist and capitalist nations. Yet, even as the countries diverged in their political directions, they had to create new ways of working together economically.
In Designing One Nation, Katrin Schreiter examines the material culture of increasing ...
This edited volume explores new engagements with the life sciences in contemporary fiction, poetry, comics and performance. The gathered case studies investigate how recent creative work reframes the human within microscopic or macroscopic scales, from cellular biology to systems ecology, and engages with the ethical, philosophical, and political i...
The Graduate Program in Sustainability Science under the Department of Urban Engineering of The University of Tokyo has been running an environmental leadership education program at the graduate student level since 2007 called the Asian Program for Incubation of Environmental Leaders (APIEL). This book describes the University's experiences in...
This book offers an original interdisciplinary overview of the role of haptic feedback in musical interaction. Divided into two parts, part I examines the tactile aspects of music performance and perception, discussing how they affect user experience and performance in terms of usability, functionality and perceived quality of musical instruments. ...
Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure combines the author's two main biographical paths: her professional commitment to the fields of both theatre and philosophy. The art of acting on stage is analysed here not only from the theoretical perspective of a spectator, but also from the perspective of the actor. The author draws on her ...
Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices help us understand ourselves, building on long histories of written, visual and quantitative modes of self-representations. This book uses examples to explore the balance between using technology to see ourselves and allowing our machines to tell us who we are....
In this open access book, seventeen scholars discuss how contemporary Scandinavian art and media have become important arenas to articulate and stage various forms of vulnerability in the Scandinavian welfare states. How do discourses of privilege and vulnerability coexist and interact in Scandinavia? How do the Scandinavian countries respond to vu...
In a world where new technologies are being developed at a dizzying pace, how can we best approach oral genres that represent heritage? Taking an innovative and interdisciplinary approach, this volume explores the idea of sharing as a model to construct and disseminate the knowledge of literary heritage with the people who are represented by and in...
The Book of Judith tells the story of a fictitious Jewish woman beheading Holofernes, the general of a powerful army, to free her people. The story has fascinated artists and authors for centuries, and is becoming a major field of research in its own right.
The Sword of Judith is the first multidisciplinary collection of essays to discuss repres...
Organized, authored, and edited over the course of five months by a class of eighteen Virginia Tech undergraduate students, Welcome to the Beatles represents their collective contribution to the larger scholarship on the most important band in rock history. The chapters build upon the work of noted author and historian Mark Lewisohn and take into a...
In this book we learn that there is a clear but complex relationship between setting and character on screen. Certain settings stand out above others—think of the iconic gooey dripping tunnels that Ripley stumbles through in Aliens, Norman’s bird-decorated parlour in Psycho or the dark Gotham of certain Batman movies. But what makes these parti...
Design research, or design studies as it is also called, has been gaining momentum as a field of academic inquiry since the beginning of 20th century. Originally, design research focused on design methods and processes but it has moved to cover more varied research questions related to design. Current research topics include, for example, how to st...
Are games worthy of academic attention? Can they be used effectively in the classroom, in the research laboratory, as an innovative design tool, as a persuasive political weapon? Game Mods: Design Theory and Criticism aims to answer these and more questions. It features chapters by authors chosen from around the world, representing fields as divers...
This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordinat...
This open book discusses British literature as part of a network of global entangled modernities and shared aesthetic concerns, departing from the retrospective model of a postcolonial "writing back" to the centre. Accordingly, the narrative strategies in the texts of early Black Atlantic authors, like Equiano, Sancho, Wedderburn, and Sea...
The Hegemony of Heritage makes an original and significant contribution to our understanding of how the relationship of architectural objects and societies to the built environment changes over time. Studying two surviving medieval monuments in southern Rajasthan - the Ambika Temple in Jagat and the Ékalingji Temple Complex in Kailaspuri - the aut...
This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible ...