Critical Affinities is the first book to explore the multifaceted relationship between the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and various dimensions of African American thought. Exploring the connections between these two unlikely interlocutors, the contributors focus on unmasking and understanding the root causes and racially inflected symptoms of various manifestations of cultural malaise. They contemplate the operative warrant for reconstituted conceptions of racial identity and recognize the existential and social recuperative potential of the will to power. In so doing, they simultaneously foster and exemplify a nuanced understanding of what both traditions regard as "the art of the cultural physician." The contributors connote daring scholarly attempts to explicate the ways in which clarifying the critical affinities between Nietzsche and various expressions of African American thought not only enriches our understanding of each, but also enhances our ability to realize the broader ends of advancing the prospects for social and psychological flourishing.

Johnson's Critical Presence demonstrates how Johnson's criticism has for long been divided from the issues of modern criticism by historical narratives that have marked the progress of criticism from 'classic to romantic'. The image of Johnson constructed by his immediate antagonists has been preserved by the routines of historical representation, and mediated to the present day, most recently, by the characterizations of 'radical theory'. By an in-depth analysis of major works by Johnson, Smallwood argues that the historicization of eighteenth-century criticism can be more fruitfully understood in the light of the 'dialogic' and 'translational' historiography of such thinkers as Collingwood and Ricoeur, and that the contexts of Johnson's criticism must include the poetry he read as well as the theories he espoused. In this way the book reinstates Johnson's 'presence' as critic while displacing the 'history of ideas' as the leading paradigm for conceptualizing the history of criticism.

Collection of essays that use queer studies and feminism as a lens for examining the relationships between racialized communities.

"Literary theory and textual criticism have much to teach each other," writes Philip Cohen, who has collected this anthology of essays that seeks to bridge what he sees as a wide rift between textual and literary critics. While most Anglo-American textual scholars now stress the importance of authorial intention and its key role in editorial and interpretative work, many literary theorists still tend to ostracize the author and his intentions from any serious literary discussion. The contributors to this collection, many of whom are well known for both their practical and theoretical work in editorial fields, look to recast in different ways the assumptions and working methods of Anglo-American editorial scholarship.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction /Catriona MacLeod -- Summaries -- Consulting the Manual: Word and Image in Marcel Duchamp's Étant donnés /Michael R. Taylor -- Living and Dying in the Limelight: Performing the Self in Frida Kahlo's Diary and Paintings /Adriana Dragomir -- Imbrication de l'image, du texte et de la musique dans un corpus de prières énigmatiques à la Vierge /Laurence Wuidar -- The Künstlerroman as Romantic Arabesque: Parody, Collaboration, and the Making of The Modern Vasari (1854) /Cordula Grewe -- The “Inscapes” of Louis le Brocquy /Karen E. Brown -- American Scenery/Canadian Scenery: Conflicting Views of Indigenes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Portrayals of the American Continent /Robert Grant -- Cartoonists as Matchmakers: The Vibrant Relationship of Text and Image in the Work of Lynda Barry /Miriam Harris -- The Truth of the Word, the Falsity of the Image: Transmetropolitan's Critique of the Society of the Spectacle /Steen Christiansen -- Le magazine français Vu (1928-40): Naissance de l'information visuelle et utopie de la substitution de l'image photographique au texte écrit /Danielle Leenaerts -- From Ekphrasis to History: Verbal Transformations of the Display of Picture Galleries--Wilhelm Heinse and Friedrich Schlegel /Hubert Locher -- Modernizing History and Historicizing Modernity: Baudelaire and Baudelairean Representations of Contemporaneity /Lauren S. Weingarden -- Serial Künstler: Portrait of the Artist as a Malefactor /Valentin Nussbaum -- Hypnotic Performance and the Falsity of Appearances: The Aesthetics of Medical Spectatorship and Axel Munthe's Critique of Jean-Martin Charcot /Jonathan Marshall -- New Light and Old Shadows: Industrial Illumination and its Imaginaire /Susana Oliveira -- Illustrating the Shadow of Doubt: Henry James, Blindness, and “The Real Thing” /Jennifer A. Greenhill -- Picturing Paradise: Baudelaire's “L'Invitation au voyage” /Eric T. Haskell -- The Writing-Drawing Continuum of Alexei Remizov /Julia Friedman -- Aby Warburg as Reader of Gottfried Semper: Reflections on the Cosmic Character of Ornament /Spyros Papapetros -- John Heartfield's Insects and the “Idea” of Natural History /Cristina Cuevas-Wolf -- The Photographic Thought of Latina/o Literature and Cultural Critique /María DeGuzmán -- Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, Fassbinder: Découpage Aesthetics on the Divide /Susan Nurmi-Schomers -- (Ideo-)Logical Alliances between Image and Script: Calligraphic Reconfigurations in Contemporary Chinese Art /Birgit Mersmann -- Contributors -- Index.

In Nietzsche and Zen: Self-Overcoming Without a Self, André van der Braak engages Nietzsche in a dialogue with four representatives of the Buddhist Zen tradition: Nagarjuna (c. 150-250), Linji (d. 860), Dogen (1200-1253), and Nishitani (1900-1990).In doing so, he reveals Nietzsche's thought as a philosophy of continuous self-overcoming, in which even the notion of "self" has been overcome. Van der Braak begins by analyzing Nietzsche's relationship to Buddhism and status as a transcultural thinker,recalling research on Nietzsche and Zen to date and setting out the basic argument of the study. He continues by examining the practices of self-overcoming in Nietzsche and Zen, comparing Nietzsche's radical skepticism with that of Nagarjuna and comparingNietzsche's approach to truth to Linji's. Nietzsche's methods of self-overcoming are compared to Dogen's zazen, or sitting meditation practice, and Dogen's notion of forgetting the self. These comparisons and others build van der Braak's case for acriticism of Nietzsche informed by the ideas of Zen Buddhism and a criticism of Zen Buddhism seen through the Western lens of Nietzsche - coalescing into one world philosophy. This treatment, focusing on one of the most fruitful areas of research withincontemporary comparative and intercultural philosophy, will be useful to Nietzsche scholars, continental philosophers, and comparative philosophers.