Encompassing some of the most recent academic research on mainstream issues of body image, weight and representation of the body, this collection addresses the body in areas such as ancient Greek poetry, new media art, comic book culture and biotechnology.

Encompassing some of the most recent academic research on mainstream issues of body image, weight and representation of the body, this collection addresses the body in areas such as ancient Greek poetry, new media art, comic book culture and biotechnology.

Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion explores the origin and evolution of the political ideology that has kept women away from centers of political power – from the birth of democracy in ancient Athens to the modern era. In this period of 2500 years, two parallel tracks advanced: while male authority tried to construct an ideology that justified women’s incompatibility with the political organization of the state, women attempted to resist their exclusion and thwart arguments about their inferiority. Although the issue of women’s status has been studied in detail in specific eras, this interdisciplinary collection extends the boundaries of the discussion. Drawing on a wide range of literary and historical sources, including Herodotus’ Histories, Plato’s Laws, María de San José’s Oaxaca Manuscript, and the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and Virginia Woolf, the chapters here reveal the various manifestations of the female-inferiority construct. Such an extensive overview of this historical trajectory promotes a deeper understanding of its causes, permutations, and persistence. Women may have made great gains toward political power, but they continue to encounter invisible barriers, raised by traditional stereotypes, that block their path to success. Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion aims to make these barriers visible, raising awareness about the longevity and tenacity of arguments, the roots of which reach classical antiquity.

European Theories in Former Yugoslavia shows that there is no such thing as a direct transfer or influence of theories from the centre to the margins, but only complex practices of borrowing, translating, and reinterpreting, conditioned by specific contexts; in this case those of former Yugoslavia and its contemporary cultural sphere. Here, reception is no longer simply about receiving fresh knowledge from the centre, but also about communicating feedback into broader contexts, shaped by multicultural and global connections and exchange. The book poses broader questions about contemporary theory today: what are theories today? How do specialised theories of culture, gender, media and art history relate to current philosophical turns in new materialism, neo-Marxism, and biopolitics? These questions, posed from the perspective of a European periphery, in this case former Yugoslavia, gesture toward the dialectically tense relationship between the centre and the margins, that is, between original theories and their transformed perspectives. The range of authors brought together here offers a cross-section of post-Yugoslav theory, comprising both young scholars in the early stages of their academic careers and more senior, established thinkers, educated both in the region and abroad, and coming from a variety of academic backgrounds, including art theory, gender theory, cultural studies and theory, sociology, anthropology, theatre studies, musicology, political theory, and literary theory, among others. The schools of thought they address, elaborate on, critique, and apply in their texts are similarly varied: from French post-structuralist theory and philosophy, via German critical and postmodern theory, to a number of other topics and authors in contemporary European theory and philosophy. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of art and media theory, philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, and their reception, interpretation, application, and elaboration in the region of former Yugoslavia.

Offering a world full of traumatized characters trapped in a consumerist society where men, women, sex and gender have become unstable commodities, Chuck Palahniuk has become one of the most controversial of contemporary novelists. This book is the first guide to bring together scholars from a full range of critical perspectives to explore three of Palahniuk's most widely-studied novels: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters and Choke. Examining these works in light of such key critical themes as violence, masculinity, postmodern aesthetics and trauma, the book also explores the ethical dimension of Palahniuk's work that is often lost in the heat of the controversies surrounding his books. Together with annotated guides to further reading, Chuck Palahniuk also includes section introductions surveying the contexts and reception of each novel, making this an essential guide for students and scholars of contemporary literature.

This insightful book explores the relationship between theater and digital culture. The authors show that the marriage of traditional performance with new technologies leads to an upheaval of the implicit “live” quality of theatre by introducing media interfaces and Internet protocols, all the while blurring the barriers between theater-makers and their audience.

Constructing a theory of intimacy describing processes occurring between a 'human' subject and information creations, Jan Stasienko shows in what way and in what phases that relationship is built and what its nature is. He discusses technologies and genres related to the construction of a new television message (teleprompter, interactive television forms appearing both in the analogue and digital eras), composition of the film image and specificity of cinematic technologies (peep show, hybrid animation, digital visual effects). Also new-media technologies and genres will be discussed (for example, aspects relating to computer games and Web portals making video materials available). This diversity is prompted by the desire to show that the building of intimacy protocols is not the domain of the digital era, and on the other hand, that the posthumanism of media apparatus is a wide-ranging problem, i.e. the area encompasses various vehicles findable throughout various historical periods.