Prosthesis (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Softcover

Wills, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804724601 ISBN 13: 9780804724609

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyses and performs certain questions about the body as an 'artificial' construction. The book deals with the mechanical (e.g., a mechanical prosthesis like an artificial leg) in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic - in order to demonstrate how far a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction, its impeccable scholarship demonstrates the permeability of the frontiers that define academic regions and delimit a scholarship determined to ascertain, to describe and prescribe, to hold in check and dominate as fields of knowledge what are in fact fields of practice, intervention, and invention.

About this title

Review

Most critical efforts look not only humble and constrained beside this magnificent book, but also simply dulldull in the sense that they have not realized (realized in the sense of understood but also in the sense of actualized ) the implication of the epistemological revolution that is casually referred to as the coming of theory. Ross Chambers, University of Michigan"

-Most critical efforts look not only humble and constrained beside this magnificent book, but also simply dull--dull in the sense that they have not realized (realized in the sense of 'understood' but also in the sense of 'actualized') the implication of the epistemological revolution that is casually referred to as the coming of 'theory.'---Ross Chambers, University of Michigan

From the Back Cover

"Most critical efforts look not only humble and constrained beside this magnificent book, but also simply dull--dull in the sense that they have not realized (realized in the sense of 'understood' but also in the sense of 'actualized') the implication of the epistemological revolution that is casually referred to as the coming of 'theory.'"--Ross Chambers, University of Michigan

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804724601
• ISBN 13: 9780804724609
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 426