Product Description:  The essential elements of a dry Japanese garden are few: rocks, gravel, moss. Simultaneously a sensual matrix, a symbolic form, and a memory theater, these gardens exhibit beautiful miniaturization and precise craftsmanship. But their apparent minimalism belies a true complexity...read more

Product Description: This major collection of essays on the Marquis de Sade encompasses a wide range of critical approaches to his oeuvre, now made available to English-language readers for the first time. It focuses on several contemporary areas of interest: the explicitly libidinal components of Sade's work and the effects they engender, the textual and narrative apparatus that supports these operations, the ethical and political concerns that arise from them, and the problematic issues surrounding the conceptual closure of representation...read more

Product Description: What does it mean to love a landscape? Why do certain authors have a predilection for specific landscapes? Why might one be fascinated by a landscape in which one would never wish to live? How does the lay of the land fashion the form of the poem? How does the wind infuse the breath? In The Wind and the Source, Allen S...read more

Product Description: Breathless explores early sound recording and the literature that both foreshadowed its invention and was contemporaneous with its early years, revealing the broad influence of this new technology at the very origins of Modernism...read more

The author samples the 'fine art' of French cuisine, offering both a rich history and a social, political, and aesthetic look at France's proudest cultural achievement. (Cookbooks)

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Product Description: Unnatural Horizons presents a selective history of the last five centuries of landscape architecture at the intersection of poetics and science, rhetoric and technology, and philosophy and politics. It investigates the relations between garden aesthetics and metaphysics, discussing issues similar to those raised by Weiss's critically acclaimed Mirrors of Infinity...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: essays/manifestos, tr w/ intro by Allen S. Weiss

The alienation of the self, the annihilation of the body, the fracturing, dispersal, and reconstruction of the disembodied voice: the themes of modernism, even of modern consciousness, occur as a matter of course in the phantasmic realm of radio. In this original work of cultural criticism, Allen S. Weiss explores the meaning of radio to the modern imagination. Weaving together cultural and technological history, aesthetic analysis, and epistemological reflection, his investigation reveals how radiophony transforms expression and, in doing so, calls into question assumptions about language and being, body and voice.Phantasmic Radio presents a new perspective on the avant-garde radio experiments of Antonin Artaud and John Cage, and brings to light fascinating, lesser-known work by, among others, Valère Novarina, Gregory Whitehead, and Christof Migone. Weiss shows how Artaud’s "body without organs" establishes the closure of the flesh after the death of God; how Cage’s "imaginary landscapes" proffer the indissociability of techne and psyche; how Novarina reinvents the body through the word in his "theater of the ears." Going beyond the art historical context of these experiments, Weiss describes how, with their emphasis on montage and networks of transmission, they marked out the coordinates of modernism and prefigured what we now recognize as the postmodern.

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Product Description: Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon analyzes the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to aesthetic discourse, and in doing so expands the range of non-normative paradigms of spectatorial identification and sexual identity...read more

Product Description: Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon analyzes the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory to aesthetic discourse, and in doing so expands the range of non-normative paradigms of spectatorial identification and sexual identity...read more

Product Description: Art Brut, also termed Outsider Art, has long been suppressed from most art historical writing. Why this rejection? The hyperbolic expressions of Romanticism and Symbolism nourished a desire for derangement and dissociation that inspired both Expressionism and Surrealism...read more