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Delusions of electronic persecution have been a preeminent symptom of psychosis for over two hundred years. In The Technical Delusion Jeffrey Sconce traces the history and continuing proliferation of this phenomenon from its origins in Enlightenment anatomy to our era of global interconnectivity. While psychiatrists have typically dismissed such delusions of electronic control as arbitrary or as mere reflections of modern life, Sconce demonstrates a more complex and interdependent history of electronics, power, and insanity. Drawing on a wide array of psychological case studies, literature, court cases, and popular media, Sconce analyzes the material and social processes that have shaped historical delusions of electronic contamination, implantation, telepathy, surveillance, and immersion. From the age of telegraphy to contemporary digitality, the media emerged within such delusions to become the privileged site for imagining the merger of electronic and political power, serving as a paranoid conduit between the body and the body politic. Looking to the future, Sconce argues that this symptom will become increasingly difficult to isolate, especially as remote and often secretive powers work to further integrate bodies, electronics, and information.

Joel Edward Goza dismantles the deep-seated myths that perpetuate white supremacy—and makes the case that reparations are necessary to heal America's racial wounds and live up to our democratic ideals. Like many well-intentioned white people, Goza once believed that he could support Black America's struggle for equality without supporting reparations. Reparations, he thought, were altogether irrelevant to the real work of racial justice. This is a book about why he was wrong. In fact, any effort to heal our nation's wounds will fail without reparations. In Rebirth of a Nation, Goza exposes lesser-known aspects of racism in American history and how Black people have consistently been depicted as responsible for their own oppression to justify slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration and gross inequality. Goza's iconoclastic and incisive account exposes how revered figures like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln embedded white supremacy deep into our nation's consciousness—and how Ronald Reagan manipulated this ideology so that society cheered as he advanced a set of policies that wounded our nation and intensified Black America's suffering. But Rebirth of a Nation is not merely about accountability. It is also about hope. A reparations process is not a utopian dream; Goza offers a practical path toward closing the racial wealth gap. Rebirth of a Nation shows readers how they can join the reparative process, working toward the creation of a more perfect union.

World War II produced a fundamental shift in modern racial discourse. In the postwar period, racism was situated for the first time at the center of international political life, and race's status as conceptual common sense and a justification for colonial rule was challenged with new intensity. In response to this crisis of race, the UN and UNESCO initiated a project of racial reeducation. This global antiracist campaign was framed by the persecution of Europe's Jews and anchored by UNESCO's epochal 1950 Statement on Race, which redefined the race concept and canonized the midcentury liberal antiracist consensus that continues to shape our present. In this book, Sonali Thakkar tells the story of how UNESCO's race project directly influenced anticolonial thought and made Jewish difference and the Holocaust enduring preoccupations for anticolonial and postcolonial writers. Drawing on UNESCO's rich archival resources and shifting between the scientific, social scientific, literary, and cultural, Thakkar offers new readings of a varied collection of texts from the postcolonial, Jewish, and Black diasporic traditions. Anticolonial thought and postcolonial literature critically recast liberal scientific antiracism, Thakkar argues, and the concepts central to this new moral economy were the medium for postcolonialism's engagement with Jewishness. By recovering these connections, she shows how the midcentury crisis of racial meaning shaped the kinds of solidarities between racialized subjects that are thinkable today.

Widely regarded as the father of science fiction, H. G. Wells was also a prolific author of history, politics and social commentary, whose works from an early date were renowned for their outspoken socialist views. This eBook presents Wells'collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare novels and tales, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. Parts Edition is available for this title. (Version 8) Please note: due to US copyright restrictions, some later novels and non-fiction texts are not included. However, when they enter the public domain, they will be added as a free upgrade. Contents: The NovelsThe Time Machine (1895)The Wonderful Visit (1895)The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)The Wheels of Chance (1896)The Invisible Man (1897)The War of the Worlds (1898)When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)Love and Mr. Lewisham (1899)The First Men in the Moon (1901)The Sea Lady (1902)The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)Kipps (1905)A Modern Utopia (1905)In the Days of the Comet (1906)The War in the Air (1908)Tono-Bungay (1909)Ann Veronica (1909)The History of Mr. Polly (1910)The Sleeper Awakes (1910)The New Machiavelli (1911)Marriage (1912)The Passionate Friends (1913)The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman (1914)The World Set Free (1914)Bealby (1915)Boon (1915)The Research Magnificent (1915)Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916)The Soul of a Bishop (1917)Joan and Peter (1918)The Undying Fire (1919)The Secret Places of the Heart (1922)Men Like Gods (1923)The Dream (1924)Christina Alberta's Father (1925)The World of William Clissold (1916)Meanwhile (1927)Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)The Bulpington of Blup (1932)Star Begotten (1937)The Camford Visitation (1937)The Brothers (1938)The Holy Terror (1939)Babes in the Darkling Wood (1939)All Aboard for Ararat (1940)You Can't Be Too Careful (1942) The Short Story CollectionsEarly Short StoriesSelect Conversations with an Uncle (1895)The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents (1895)The Plattner Story and Others (1897)Tales of Space and Time (1899)Twelve Stories and a Dream (1903)The Country of the Blind and Other Stories (1911)The Door in the Wall and Other Stories (1911)Uncollected Short Stories The Short StoriesList of Short Stories in Chronological OrderList of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order The Non-FictionText-Book of Biology (1893)Certain Personal Matters (1897)Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human and many more -- too many to list!

Various pedagogies, such as the use of digital learning in education, have been used and researched for decades, but many schools have little to show for these initiatives. This contrasts starkly with technology-supported initiatives in other fields such as business and healthcare. Traditional pedagogies and general digital technology applications have yet to impact education in a significant way that transforms learning. A primary reason for this minimal impact on learning is that digital technologies have attempted to make traditional instructional processes more efficient rather than using a more appropriate paradigm for learning. As such, it is important to look at digital technology as a partner and use transformative applications to become partners with students (not teachers) to empower their learning process both in and out of school. The Handbook of Research on Transformative and Innovative Pedagogies in Education is a comprehensive reference that identifies and justifies the paradigm of transformative learning and pedagogies in education. It provides exemplars of existing transformative applications that, if used as partners to empower student learning, have the potential to dramatically engage students in a type of learning that better fits 21st century learners. Covering topics such as gamification, project-based learning, and professional development, this major reference work is an essential resource for pre-service and in-service teachers, educational technologists, instructional designers, educational administration and faculty, researchers, and academicians seeking pedagogical models that inspire students to learn meaningfully.

WINNER, HELEN AND HOWARD R. MARRARO PRIZE IN ITALIAN HISTORYDiscloses the richness of ideas and sheds light on the controversy that characterized the transition from fascism to democracy, examining authors, works and memories that were subsequently silenced by Cold War politics.How a shared memory of Fascism and its cultural heritage took shape is still today the most disputed question of modern Italy, crossing the boundaries between academic and public discourse. Against Redemption concentrates on the historical period in which disagreement was at its highest: the transition between the downfall of Mussolini in July 1943 and the victory of the Christian Democrats over the Left in the 1948 general elections. By dispelling the silence around the range of opinion in the years before the ideological struggle fossilized into Cold War oppositions, this book points to early postwar literary practices as the main vehicle for intellectual dissent, shedding new light on the role of cultural policies in institutionalizing collective memory. During Italy's transition to democracy, competing narratives over the recent traumatic past emerged and crystallized, depicting the country's break with Mussolini's regime as a political and personal redemption from its politics of exclusion and unrestrained use of violence. Conversely, outstanding authors such as Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, Alberto Moravia, and Curzio Malaparte, in close dialogue with remarkable but now-neglected figures, stressed the cultural continuity between the new democracy and Fascism, igniting heated debates from opposite political standpoints. Their works addressed questions such as the working through of national defeat, Italian responsibility in World War II, and the Holocaust, revealing how the social, racial, and gender biases that character­ized Fascism survived after its demise and haunted the newborn democracy.

Video Game Chronotopes and Social Justice examines how the chronotope, which literally means “timespace,” is an effective interpretive lens through which to understand the cultural and ideological significance of video games. Using ‘slow readings'attuned to deconstruction along the lines of post-structuralist theory, gender studies, queer studies, continental philosophy, and critical theory, Mike Piero exposes the often-overlooked misogyny, heteronormativity, racism, and patriarchal structures present in many Triple-A video games through their arrangement of timespace itself. Beyond understanding time and space as separate mechanics and dimensions, Piero reunites time and space through the analysis of six chronotopes—of the bonfire, the abject, the archipelago, the fart as pharmakon, madness, and coupled love—toward a poetic meaning making that is at the heart of play itself, all in affirmation of life, equity, and justice.

A high-level insider's history of the efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from 2000 Camp David Talks to the present, that explains why successive attempts have all failed. The clash between Israel and Palestine has been one of the most emotionally engaging causes of modern times. Prophets without Honor tells the story of the grueling attempts to solve the conflict and examines the reasons for its resilience. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who participated at a high level in the July 2000 Camp David peace talks that almost led to a historic deal, uses his insider experience to illuminate the specific factors that impede a solution to the conflict. He finds that the occupation's traits of permanence, Israel's insatiable quest for Lebensraum, and a hopelessly fragmented and disoriented Palestinian national movement are to blame. Ben-Ami challenges the funereal historiography that emerged in the wake of the Camp David process, when--for the first time ever--Israelis and Palestinians engaged in the Sisyphean task of breaking the taboos surrounding the conflict. The Clinton Peace Parameters that emerged out of this process eventually became the litmus test of every serious peace proposal in the future. But ill-conceived perceptions of the other party, all-or-nothing theological fanaticism, and a lack of bold and enlightened leadership have made these attempts at peace-making a defining failure of the two-state concept. Ben-Ami scrutinizes the ominous alternatives to the two-state solution, such as the binational state, a unilateral pullout from much of the West Bank, and Donald Trump's Deal of the Century. He also examines the merits of a Jordanian-Palestinian solution. In discussing Palestine from a comparative perspective, he underlines its singularity while also shedding light on the dilemmas that stand at the center of any peace enterprise. Ultimately, his account is the most non-partisan, comprehensive, and balanced written by an insider representing one of the parties.

This book evaluates the current state of world (dis)order at a time of growing populism, nationalism and pandemic panic. It distils the implications of the ‘civilisational state'for world order.The retreat of US leadership is mirrored by the decline of both the material and normative liberal multilateral infrastructure it supported. Meanwhile, the rise of China as a challenger is accompanied in political, economic and cultural terms by other emerging powers no longer bound to the norms of 20th century world affairs, notably Turkey, India, China and Russia. By emphasising a cultural lens of analysis alongside robust political and economic analysis, the author offers a prescriptive agenda for the coming post-pandemic age that recognises the changing powers of civilisational, state and hybrid non-state actors. Without overestimating their probabilities, he outlines prospects and preconditions for effective inter-civilisational dialogue and proposes a series of minimal conditions for a multilateral ‘reset'.This book will appeal to public and private decision-makers, the media, the educated lay public and civil society actors interested in the rise of civilisational politics and its possible consequences for world affairs. It will be of particular interest to students and researchers in the fields of politics, international relations, international political economy, geopolitics, strategic studies, foreign policy and social psychology.

This study – the first full-length monograph in English on the subject – discusses the genesis of Theodor Lessing's philosophy of history as mainly expressed in his books Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen (1919 and 1927), as well as its philosophical implications. Lessing on the one hand vehemently denies that historians can know the past as it actually happened. On the other hand, and rather surprisingly, he emphasizes the exceptional importance of history within a culture, because of what he calls its religious function. His penetrating analysis of history is remarkably relevant for ongoing debates on the very nature of history.

​“This book is very timely: the instrumentalization of history for political goals has become a pressing issue and worrisome feature of many polities, to the point of challenging even the most consolidated democracies. Focusing on Yugoslavia's fragile successor states, the authors explore plurifold analytical levels, including local, regional, transnational, European and global perspectives. The authors comprehensively demonstrate how politicizing history, in the postwar and postcommunist societies of what was once Yugoslavia, has prevented both reconciliation and democratization.”—Sabine Rutar, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Germany“Ognjenovic and Jozelic focus here on the former Yugoslavia before and after its fragmentation to explore and evaluate the various uses of histories by nationalists, both those who promoted ‘federal nationalism'and those who peddle specific local nationalisms in successor states. The book deals specifically with the Western Balkans, but these developments have their parallels in many other parts of the world, and the book will be useful well beyond the region on which the study is based.”—Paul Mojzes, Professor Emeritus, Rosemont College, USA“The former Yugoslavia has become a battlefield for the ‘Memory Wars', in spite of the wealth of judicially established facts and available evidences gathered about the atrocities in the region, and various initiatives aimed at dealing with the past and efforts at transitional justice. Focusing on three periods of Yugoslav history – the Second World War, socialist Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars of 1991–2001 – the contributors show that despite these efforts to deal with the past, sustainable peace and reconciliation across ethnic and religious groups remain a distant aim.” —Marijana Toma, Center for Cultural Decontamination, SerbiaThis book analyzes how nationalists in the former Yugoslavia have politicized history to further their political agendas, retaining and prolonging conflict among different cultural and religious groups, and impeding the process of lasting reconciliation. It explores how narratives have been (mis)used, drawing on examples from all of the former Yugoslav republics. With contributors from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, it provides a vital assessment of how nationalists have attempted to (re)shape public collective memory and relativize facts.

Traces the career of the widely read cultural historian Johannes Scherr and his development of a new kind of historical writing for the increasingly globalized 19th-century world.The German nineteenth century saw a boom in publishing and reading that created opportunities not only for Dichter, creators of great literature, but also for Schriftsteller, authors of the second rank. Among the latter were cultural mediators who helped readers negotiate the ever-expanding galaxy of print. Few achieved greater prominence than Johannes Scherr, whose remarkable career as a critic, anthologist, and historian of German and world literature began in the turbulent Vormärz era and continued during years of exile in the unlikely setting of the Zurich Polytechnic. He wrote from the vantage point of Switzerland, but his books were published in Germany, where his polemical style found favor. Andrew Cusack's study traces the process of Scherr's literary socialization as mediator in the'contact zone'formed by the Kingdom of Württemberg and Switzerland, whose liberal project of Volksbildung inspired him. It considers how his liminal position between nations and between the humanities and the sciences led him to develop a form of historical authorship for the increasingly globalized nineteenth century. The book considers Scherr's engagement with the totalizing paradigms of cultural history and world literature and sets his pessimistic worldview in the context of the materialism and violent political agitation that threatened democratic values in Switzerland and elsewhere.

This collection of essays surveys the practices, behaviors, and beliefs that developed during slavery in the Western Hemisphere, and the lingering psychological consequences that continue to impact the descendants of enslaved Africans today. The psychological legacies of slavery highlighted in this volume were found independently in Brazil, the U.S., Belize, Jamaica, Colombia, Haiti, and Martinique. They are color prejudice, self and community disdain, denial of trauma, black-on-black violence, survival crime, child beating, underlying African spirituality, and use of music and dance as community psychotherapy. The effects on descendants of slave owners include a belief in white supremacy, dehumanization of self and others, gun violence, and more. Essays also offer solutions for dealing with this vast psychological legacy. Knowledge of the continuing effects of slavery has been used in psychotherapy, family, and group counseling of African slave descendants. Progress in resolving these legacies has been made as well using psychohistory, forensic psychiatry, family social histories, and community mental health. This knowledge is crucial to eventual reconciliation and resolution of the continuing legacies of slavery and the slave trade.

Between 2007 and 2011, Michael Eigen gave three seminars in Seoul, each running over three days and covering different aspects of psychoanalysis, spirituality and the human psyche. This book is based on a transcription of the third seminar, which took place in 2011, on the subject of Pain and Beauty. The first two were published as Madness and Murder (2010) and Faith and Transformation (2011).A conjunction of the pain that shatters and beauty that heals is made by many authors, including Bion, Winnicott, Milner, Meltzer, Perls, Ehrenzweig, Matte-Blanco, Schneur Zalman, Chuang-Tzu, Buber, Castaneda, and Levinas. These and others are used as windows of the psyche, adding to possibilities of experience and opening dimensions that bring us life. Eigen explores challenges of the human psyche, what we are up against and the resources difficulties can stimulate.This work spans many dimensions of human experience with interplay, fusions and oppositions of pain, beauty, terror, and wonder, and makes use of poetic and philosophical expressions of experience. It will be vital reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and all those with an interest in psychoanalytic and spiritual psychology.

Americans would be shocked to understand just how their religious beliefs have been used against them in the political elites'efforts to engineer society and public policy. In this historical overview of key moments in American religious history, Gadsby demonstrates that what we are commonly-taught in our education systems, mass-media and the political world about religions'role in any number of events, is anything but. In the spirit of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Religious Delusions, American Style discusses eight areas in American history ranging from turn-of-the-nineteenth-century eugenics and the Scopes'Monkey'Trial, to the mind-control program known as Jonestown, to the implausible two-planes-three-buildings-straight-down operation called 9/11, we have been deceived in a big way about what has been done in the name of religion.

This collection of essays explores the ways in which talking therapies have been depicted in twentieth century and contemporary narratives (life-writings, fiction and poetry) in French. This vibrant corpus of francophone literary engagements of therapy has so far been widely unexplored, but it offers rich insights into the connections between literature and psychoanalysis. As the number of autobiographical and fictional depictions of the therapeutic encounter is still on the rise, these creative outputs raise pressing questions: why do narratives of the therapeutic encounter continue to fascinate writers and readers? What do these works tell us about the particular culture and history in which they are written? What do they tell us about therapeutic and other human encounters? The volume highlights the important role that the creative arts have played in offering representations and explorations of our minds, our relationships, and our mental health, or more pressingly, ill-health. The volume's focus is not only on the patient's experience as expressed via the creative act and as counterweight to the practitioner's “case study”, but more specifically on the therapeutic encounter, specifically the relationship between therapist and patient. The contributors here engage with ideas and methodologies within contemporary psychoanalytic thought, including, but not limited to, those of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, André Green, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donald Winnicott, highlighting the dynamic research culture that exists in this field and maintaining a dialogue between the humanities and various therapeutic disciplines. Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter combines the analysis of psychoanalytic and fictional texts to explore the implications that arise from the space between the participants in therapy, including creative and aesthetic inspirations, therapeutic potentials, and ethical dilemmas.

In his novel The Eighth Wonder of the World, Plevnes takes his dark sense of humor and undeniable wit on a search for a common ground in an uncommon world. His protagonist Alexander Simsar, during the last 3.3 seconds of his life in Berlin in 1989 (weeks before the fall of Berlin Wall), envisions the creation of a monument—an eighth wonder of the world—that would embrace humanity in all its layers and countenances. In this absurdist novel, Plevnes invents a utopia that unites many of the differences in the world: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and even Satanism.The Eighth Wonder of the World is yet another of Jordan Plevnes's parables of hope. His preoccupation with the role of beauty in the context of social, religious, and cultural differences is front and center, as is his central question: Does humanism have a prospect of survival in the future of humankind? Plevnes suggests that survival and idealism can be found in beauty and art —and that only beauty and art have the power to save the world.

Many on the Left see the European Union as a fundamentally benign project with the potential to underpin ever greater cooperation and progress. If it has drifted rightward, the answer is to fight for reform from within. In this iconoclastic polemic, economist Costas Lapavitsas demolishes this view. He contends that the EU's response to the Eurozone crisis represents the ultimate transformation of the union into a neoliberal citadel that institutionally embeds austerity, privatization, and wage cuts. Concurrently, the rise of German hegemony has divided the EU into an unstable core and dependent peripheries. These related developments make the EU impervious to meaningful reform. The solution is therefore a direct challenge to the EU project that stresses popular and national sovereignty as preconditions for true internationalist socialism. Lapavitsas's powerful manifesto for a left opposition to the EU upends the wishful thinking that often characterizes the debate and will be a challenging read for all on the Left interested in the future of Europe.

Publication of the Global Studies Directory represents an unprecedented project in world practice. Based on the professional assessment by a large international team of experts, the Directory offers information on the most well-known scholars, political and public figures who have made outstanding contributions to the establishment and development of global studies or made a fundamental impact on the formation of global world. The Directory also contains comprehensive information about organizations, periodicals and special literature of direct relevance to the theory and practice of globalization and fully demonstrates the state of affairs in the field of study on a global level. This project is a continuation of many years of research which first resulted in the publication of the Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary, the companion publication to the Directory.

This book is about the metanarrative and metafictional elements of J. M. Coetzee's novels. It draws together authorship, readership, ethics, and formal analysis into one overarching argument about how narratives work the boundary between art and life. On the basis of Coetzee's writing, it reconsiders the concept of metalepsis, challenges common understandings of self-reflexive discourse, and invites us to rethink our practice as critics and readers.This study analyzes Coetzee's novels in three chapters organized thematically around the author's relation with character, reader, and self. Author and character are discussed on the basis of Foe, Slow Man, and Coetzee's Nobel lecture,'He and His Man'. Stories featuring the character Elizabeth Costello, or the figuration Elizabeth Curren, serve to elaborate the relation of author and reader. The study ends on a reading of Summertime, Diary of a Bad Year, and Dusklands as Coetzee's engagement with autobiographical writing, analyzing the relation of author and self. It will appeal to readers with an interest in literary and narrative theory as much as to Coetzee scholars and advanced students.

Cultural Genealogy explores the popularization in the Renaissance of the still pervasive myth that later cultures are the hereditary descendants of ancient or older cultures. The core of this myth is the widespread belief that a numinous charismatic power can be passed down unchanged, and in concrete forms, from earlier eras. Raphael Falco shows that such a process of descent is an impossible illusion in a knowledge-based culture. Anachronistic adoption of past values can only occur when these values are adapted and assimilated to the target culture. Without such transcultural adaptation, ancient values would appear as alien artifacts rather than as eternal truths. Scholars have long acknowledged the Renaissance borrowings from classical antiquity, but most studies of translatio studii or translatio imperii tacitly accept the early modern myth that there was a genuine translation of Greek and Roman cultural values from the ancient world to the'modern.'But as Falco demonstrates, this is patently not the case. The mastering of ancient languages and the rediscovery of lost texts has masked the fact that surprisingly little of ancient religious, ethical, or political ideology was retained — so little that it is crucial to ask why these myths of transcultural descent have not been recognized and interrogated. Through examples ranging from Petrarch to Columbus, Maffeo Vegio to the Habsburgs, Falco shows how the new techne of systematic genealogy facilitated the process of'remythicizing'the ancient authorities, utterly transforming Greek and Roman values and reforging them into the mold of contemporary needs. Chiefly a study of intellectual culture, Cultural Genealogy has ramifications reaching into all levels of society, both early modern and later.

Contributions by Eric Bain-Selbo, Jeremy Barris, Maria Botero, Manuel “Mandel” Cabrera Jr., David J. Leichter, Ian MacRae, Jeff McLaughlin, Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera, Corry Shores, and Jarkko TuusvuoriIn a follow-up to Comics as Philosophy, international contributors address two questions: Which philosophical insights, concepts, and tools can shed light on the graphic novel? And how can the graphic novel cast light on the concerns of philosophy? Each contributor ponders a well-known graphic novel to illuminate ways in which philosophy can untangle particular combinations of image and written word for deeper understanding.Jeff McLaughlin collects a range of essays to examine notable graphic novels within the framework posited by these two questions. One essay discusses how a philosopher discovered that the panels in Jeff Lemire's Essex County do not just replicate a philosophical argument, but they actually give evidence to an argument that could not have existed otherwise. Another essay reveals how Chris Ware's manipulation of the medium demonstrates an important sense of time and experience. Still another describes why Maus tends to be more profound than later works that address the Holocaust because of, not in spite of, the fact that the characters are cartoon animals rather than human.Other works contemplated include Will Eisner's A Contract with God, Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, and Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. Mainly, each essay, contributor, graphic novelist, and artist is doing the same thing: trying to tell us how the world is—at least from their point of view.

Japanese film is enduringly fascinating, challenging and rewarding. This book provides a cultural, historical and philosophical study of Japanese film, from the silent era to the present-day, focusing on its expansive consciousness. The author examines masterpieces by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Oshima and many other directors, discussing their influence on the Japanese culture of esoteric Zen Buddhism and relating them to recent neuroscientific theories of brain trauma.