Literary theory has been dominated by a mind/body dualism that often eschews the role of the body in reading. Focusing on reading as a physical practice, McLaughlin analyzes the role of the eyes, the hands, postures and gestures, bodily habits and other physical spaces, with discussions ranging from James Joyce to the digital future of reading.

This book explores the new performativity in art theory and practice, examining ways of rethinking interpretive processes in visual culture. Since the 1960s, visual art practices - from body art to minimalism - have taken contemporary art outside the museum and gallery; by embracing theatricality and performance and exploding the boundaries set by traditional art criticism. The contributors argue that interpretation needs to be recognised as much more dynamic and contingent. Offering its own performance script, and embracing both canonical fine artists such as Manet, De Kooning and Jasper Johns, and performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Gunter Brus, this book offers radical re-readings of art works and points confidently towards new models for understanding art.

Ritual purity is one of the least understood aspects of Islamic law and practice, yet it enjoys a prominent place in traditional legal texts and permeates the daily life of ordinary believers. Body of Text examines the emergence and crystallization of the law of ritual purity, using early sources to reconstruct the formative debates among Muslim scholars. The lively interaction among legal theorizing, caliphal politics, and popular practice illustrates the formation of the law, because as scholars strove for synthesis, they advanced competing understandings of the underlying structure and meaning of ritual purity. Katz demonstrates that no single theory can adequately interpret the diversity of opinion within the tradition.

What is "scientific" about the natural and human sciences? Precisely this: the legibility of our worlds and the distinctive reading strategies that they provoke. That account of the essence of science comes from Edith Stein, who as HusserI's assistant 1916-1918 labored in vain to bring his massive Ideen to publication, and then went on to propose her own solution to the problem of finding a unified foundation for the social and physical sciences. Stein argued that human bodily life itself affords direct access to the interplay of natural causality, cultural motivation, and personal initiative in history and technology. She developed this line of approach to the sciences in her early scholarly publications, which too soon were overshadowed by her religious lectures and writings, and eventually were obscured by National Socialism's ideological attack on philosophies of empathy. Today, as her church prepares to declare Stein a saint, her secular philosophical achievements deserve another look.

Body of Text is a collection of concrete poems made by marrying poetry with body-based performance art and documentary photography. Dressed in a full black body-suit, Michael V. Smith is photographed by David Ellingsen in hundreds of poses which resemble Greco-Roman letters, Asian characters, hieroglyphs, or Rorschach inkblots. These are then arranged in book form, to a maximum of three images per page. In the same spirit of ï¿1/2moving beyond language' as heard in the sound poetry of Christian Bï¿1/2k, the poems in Body of Text occupy a liminal space between poetry and visual art. The body is made word, is made ï¿1/2site, ' ï¿1/2object' and ï¿1/2subject.' The body is symbol.

The Body as Text establishes the importance of cultural readings of the Body. Focusing on various bodies that cultures establish in their indigenous dialogues, the book moves through readings incorporated by/in classical witchcraft, Iron-age bog people of Northern Europe, and pornography.

This book presents a collection of academic essays that take a fresh look at content and body transformation in the new media, highlighting how old hierarchies and canons of analysis must be revised. The movement of narratives and characterisations across forms, conventionally understood as adaptation, has commonly involved high-status classical forms (drama, epic, novel) being transformed into recorded and broadcast media (film, radio and television), or from the older recorded media to the newer ones. The advent of convergent digital platforms has further transformed hierarchies, and the formation of global conglomerates has created the commercial conditions for ever more lucrative exchanges between different media. Now source texts can move in any direction and take up any configuration, as emerging interacting fan bases drive innovation and new creative and commercial possibilities are deployed. Moreover, transformation may be not just a technology-driven creative practice and response, but at the very centre of the thematic worlds developed in those forms of story-telling which are currently popular: television series, video games, films and novels. The magic transformation of “your” money into “their” money is paralleled in contemporary media and culture by the centrality of transformation of one product to another as a media industry practice, as well as the transformation of bodies as a major theme both in the ensuing media products and in people’s identity practices in daily life.