Bloody and fiery spectacles in American public life, from the 1960s to the present, have given us moments of catastrophe that easily answer to the question of where-were-you-when, events that shape our ways of seeing the Cold War and after. Three such iconic catastrophes are the John F. Kennedy assassination, the response by Ronald Reagan to the Challenger disaster, and 9/11. Why are these spectacles so packed with meaning? They are images of destruction, raising the questions for us of where their power comes from, what sort of history might they construct, what sort of world do they destroy. O Gorman approaches each one as an icon of iconoclasm, as an exemplar of fiery demise that gives us a distinct way to imagine social existence in American life. Here is his argument: in the 50 years since the Kennedy assassination, a period that witnessed the rise of neoliberalism, the most powerful way for publics to see America was in the destruction of its representative symbols, or icons, because in such catastrophes we grasp the impossibility of any image adequate to representing America. If neoliberalism the emergence of free market economics in social philosophy and public policy is linked with iconoclasm, that is, if neoliberalism promotes and benefits from the destruction of icons, we are led to reconsider events that seem to rupture a given world (catastrophes), or are beyond representation (the economy). Market ideology moves to a transcendent realm of invisible principles that can escape accountability and command sacrifice. The core arguments are challenging (indeed, iconoclastic), but this book will put a whole new kind of spotlight on neoliberalism and on the status of the image (and visual representation) in American political culture. The results are stunning: richly interwoven philosophical, theological, and rhetorical traditions turn out to be a basis for a complex and innovative approach to Cold War America, political theory, and visual culture studies."

Through vivid accounts of successful innovators ranging from glass artist Dale Chihuly to physicist Richard Feynman to the country/rock trio the Dixie Chicks, Berns reveals the inner workings of the iconoclast’s mind with remarkable clarity. Each engaging chapter goes on to describe practical actions we can each take to understand and unleash our own potential to think differently—such as seeking out new environments, novel experiences, and first-time acquaintances.

The first comparative, cross-cultural study of medieval illustrated histories that engages in a direct, confrontational dialogue with Byzantine historical memory.

With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

By gathering both original essays and several newly translated documents into a single volume, editors Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead provide a close audition to some of the most telling and soundful moments in the "deaf century," including the fantastic acoustic scenarios projected through the writings of Raymond Roussel, the "gap music" of Marcel Duchamp, the varied sonic activities of the early Russian avant-garde and of French Surrealism, the language labyrinths constructed by the producers of New German Horspiel, and the cut-up ventriloquism of William S. Burroughs. Approaches in the essays vary from detailed historical reconstructions to more speculative theory, providing a rich chorus of challenges to the culturally entrenched "regime of the visual." Supporting documents include F.T. Marinetti's explosive manifesto on the aesthetics of Futurist radio and the full text of Antonin Artaud's blistering radio performance, To Have Done with the Judgment of God.

Richard Kearney has produced a new and revised paperback edition of his classic book Poetics of Imagining. This volume offers an accessible account of the major theories of imagination in modern European thought. It analyses and assesses the decisive contributions made to our understanding of the imaginary life of phenomenology (Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard), hermeuneutics (Heidegger, Ricoeur) and post-modernism (Vattimo, Kristeva, Lyotard). Richard Kearney achieves this with a coherent and committed approach which displays his own passionate concern for the claims of imagination in our post-modern world of fragmentation and fracture.