Product Description: Pipilotti Rist (born 1962) burst onto the international art scene in the late 1980s with visually lush video and multimedia works that explore sexuality and media culture through playful and provocative remixes of fantasy and the everyday...read more

Product Description: Crossmappings here collects for the first time a selection of distinguished literary and art critic, Elisabeth Bronfen’s highly praised essays on visual culture for a wider public, many of which have never before been available in English...read more

Product Description: Addresses the question of how identity is formed as a result of corporeal and cultural positioning, by mapping Dorothy Richardson's early modernist text, Pilgrimage, against our postmodern interest in real and imagined geographies.

Product Description: Number Two: Fragile documents the second exhibition of works from the Julia Stoschek Collection, whose theme was corporeality in videos, installations and photography. Artists include Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Nathalie Djurberg, Bruce Nauman, Pipilotti Rist and Rosemarie Trockel...read more

Product Description: There are few enough female artists who have maintained an international reputation across the entire second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, but fortunately the Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (born 1919) is one of them...read more

Product Description: Sigmund Freud defined trauma as "an experience which, within a short period of time, presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way." The subject represses the traumatic experience, which then begins to enter into consciousness through its only other avenue, the dream--or, quite often, the nightmare...read more

Product Description: From the secrets of the universe to the healing powers of music, this book draws on the passions of eight professionals who explore the "power" behind their own particular fields of interest, from the arts and humanities to the natural sciences...read more

Product Description: To say that Paul McCarthy is a provocative artist is to make an understatement as gross as the artist's own infamous use of chocolate syrup and Santa Claus costumes. Since the late 1960s, McCarthy has pushed the boundaries of taboo through the media of performance art, sculpture, and video, aiming for ultimate catharsis via an inside-out journey through sticky layers of shock and provocation...read more

Product Description: Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home -- and the power to get there -- had been with her all along...read more

Product Description: In this engaging and original study Professor Bronfen examines Sylvia Plath's poetry, her novel, The Bell Jar, her shorter fiction, and her autobigraphical texts in the context of the resilient Plath legend that has grown since her suicide in 1963.

Product Description: Japanese-born artist Leiko Ikemura has been living in Europe for nearly 30 years, creating artworks that explore these two cultures and questions central to human existence.Depicting space as it extends beyond the material and the measurable, a contemplative space of spirituality and sensuality, her new paintings, watercolors, and sculptures draw the viewer into an event which transcends specific cultures...read more

Product Description: Cindy Sherman’s photographs are almost immediately recognizable. Using herself as the model, she assumes numerous disguises to portray "characters" both fictional and famous, or to reinvent situations both commonplace and extraordinary...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Chosen to represent Germany in the 2001 Venice Biennale, Gregor Schneider has, since the 1980s, dedicated himself to building rooms as an expression of his art. The focus of his work has been an ordinary tenement building in Germany, known as "Haus u r," where he has lived while transforming it into a building of great atmospheric density though the process of continuous rebuilding...read more

Product Description: Exploring the status of feminism in this "postfeminist" age, this sophisticated meditation on feminist thinking over the past three decades moves away from the all too common dependence on French theorists and male thinkers and instead builds on a wide-ranging body of feminist theory written by women...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Surrealist writer André Breton praised hysteria for being the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century, but many physicians have since viewed it as the "wastebasket of medicine," a psychosomatic state that defies attempts at definition and cure and that can be easily mistaken for other pathological conditions. In light of a resurgence of critical interest in hysteria, leading feminist scholar Elisabeth Bronfen reinvestigates medical writings and cultural performance to reveal the continued relevance of a disorder widely thought to be a romantic formulation of the past. Through a critical rereading, she develops a new concept of hysteria, one that challenges traditional gender-based theories linking it to dissatisfied feminine sexual desire. Bronfen turns instead to hysteria's traumatic causes, particularly the fear of violation, and shows how the conversion of psychic anguish into somatic symptoms can be interpreted today as the enactment of personal and cultural discontent.Tracing the development of cultural formations of hysteria from the 1800s to the present, this book explores the writings of Freud, Charcot, and Janet together with fictional texts (Radcliffe, Stoker, Anne Sexton), opera (Mozart, Wagner), cinema (Cronenberg, Hitchcock, Woody Allen), and visual art (Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Cindy Sherman). Each of these creative works attests to a particular relationship between hysteria and self-fashioning, and enables us to read hysteria quite literally as a language of discontent. The message broadcasted by the hysteric is one of vulnerability: vulnerability of the symbolic, of identity, and of the human body itself.Throughout this work, Bronfen not only offers fresh approaches to understanding hysteria in our culture, but also introduces a new metaphor to serve as a theoretical tool. Whereas the phallus has long dominated psychoanalytical discourse, the image of the navel--a knotted originary wound common to both genders--facilitates discussion of topics relevant to hysteria, such as trauma, mortality, and infinity. Bronfen's insights make for a lively, innovative work sure to interest readers across the fields of art and literature, feminism, and psychology.

Product Description: Death is a subject of increasing interest in virtually all academic disciplines, yet there is surprisingly little theoretical work on the representation of death in literary contexts. Death and Representation offers a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary essays, rich in cultural perspectives but sharing a relatively common vocabulary...read more

Product Description: The conjuction of death, art, and femininity is a rich and unexplored stratum of Western culture. Why do dead women fascinate even as they repel? Why is the death of a beautiful woman figure so centrallly located in art and literature? And what does this tell us about the role of women in contemprary Westen society? In Over Her Dead Body, Elisabeth Bronfen attempts to remap the history of Western thought about women's bodies...read more