Snapping and Wrapping: Personal Photography in Japan

Richard M. Chalfen, Temple University

March 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-121-2
Availability: In stock
232pp. ¦ $61 £46 €52

'Snapping and Wrapping' represents an original study in Japanese visual culture, pictorial communication, and photographic studies. Vernacular visual culture is highlighted, stressing ordinary people and everyday life to explore photographic expressions of Japanese family life. The theme of “how people looked” is described from two closely related perspectives: how people appeared in their own photographs, and how people looked at specific features of their own lives with analog camera technology. The book includes unexamined material based on a qualitative study involving personal fieldwork undertaken between 1993 and 2009. The metaphor of “wrapping culture” (Hendry) is suggested for ways of interpreting relationships of personal family photographs in conjunction with acknowledged cultural influences and values of Japanese culture. Across an introduction and six chapters, the book covers a series of research topics evoked by efforts to recover, repair, and return millions of photographs to survivors following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. Memory, privacy and kinds of information control are reviewed as parts of strategies of sharing pictures, “presence” and the use of photographs for interpersonal interaction and communication. Throughout the monograph, emphasis is placed on understanding details of analog personal photography for potential comparisons to the intensely popular digitalization of photographic recordings and, in turn, facilitate making informed speculations for future photographic practice. This book will be of interest to upper-level students, graduate students and scholars in the fields of media and culture, Asian Studies (especially Japanese visual culture), as well as those working on sensitive relationships of family, memory and representation.

The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer: On Writing Illnesses and Illnesses in Writing

Edited by Jayjit Sarkar, Raiganj University, India and Jagannath Basu, Sitalkuchi College, India

May 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-064-2
Availability: In stock
323pp. ¦ $65 £48 €55

Focusing on the various intersections between illness and literature across time and space, The Portrait of an Artist as a Pathographer seeks to understand how ontological, phenomenological and epistemological experiences of illness have been dealt with and represented in literary writings and literary studies. In this volume, scholars from across the world have come together to understand how the pathological condition of being ill (the sufferers), as well as the pathologists dealing with the ill (the healers and caregivers), have shaped literary works. The language of medical science, with its jargon, and the language of the every day, with its emphasis on utility, prove equally insufficient and futile in capturing the pain and suffering of illness. It is this insufficiency and futility that makes us turn towards the canonical works of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, Miroslav Holub as well as the non-canonical António Lobo Antunes, Yumemakura Baku, Wopko Jensma and Vaslav Nijinsky. This volume helps in understanding and capturing the metalanguage of illness while presenting us with the tradition of ‘writing pain’. In an effort to expand the definition of pathography to include those who are on the other side of pain, the essays in this collection aim to portray the above-mentioned pathographers as artists, turning the anxiety and suffering of illness into an art form. Looking deeply into such creative aspects of illness, this book also seeks to evoke the possibility of pathography as world literature. This book will be of particular interest to undergraduate, postgraduate and research students, as well as scholars of literature and medical humanities who are interested in the intersections between literary studies and medical science.

Liberty & Prosperity: Liberal economics for achieving universal prosperity

Gopi Krishna Suvanam

February 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-198-4
Availability: In stock
158pp. ¦ $36 £27 €30

‘Liberty & Prosperity: Liberal Economics for Achieving Universal Prosperity’ aims to illuminate alternative policy framework using liberal economic policies. The evolution of this book is grounded in the author’s personal and professional experience investigating economies around the world and therefore takes a global view. The ideas discussed are intended for countries currently under different stages of development and are not restricted to only developed countries or emerging economies. This book examines what we as a society can do to achieve universal prosperity with the recurring topic of the intertwining nature of liberty and prosperity; without prosperity, man cannot have true liberty, and the best way to achieve universal prosperity is by providing liberty to all. It identifies the appropriate measures from existing liberal theories that could help achieve this long-term goal, while also introducing contrarian ideas, including the elimination of income tax, denationalization of money, and the reduction in the role of central banks. The central theme is that liberty in all aspects of economic activity, coupled with universal basic income, could create universal prosperity. This book will particularly appeal to those with a general interest in the economy and business, as well as students who seek an overview of classical macroeconomic principles; however, the book’s innovative ideas may also be of interest to professional economists.

Dialectic, Rhetoric and Contrast: The Infinite Middle of Meaning

Richard Boulton, St George’s, University of London; Kingston University

April 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-149-6
Availability: In stock
148pp. ¦ $44 £33 €37

By compiling an experimental method combining both dialectic and rhetoric, ‘Dialectic, Rhetoric and Contrast: The Infinite Middle of Meaning’ demonstrates how singular meanings can be rendered in a spectrum of 12 repeating concepts that are in a continuum, gradated and symmetrical. The ability to arrange meaning into this pattern opens enquiry into its ontology, and presents meaning as closer to the sensation of colours or musical notes than the bivalent oppositions depicted in classical logic. However, the experiment does not assert that this pattern suggests some sort of constant or absolute principle; instead, it theorises on the ways in which meaning can be considered to be recursive. To explain this, the book explores the concept of contrast itself. No exactitude on the precise existence of contrast can ever be struck because the answer varies infinitely depending upon the scale of measurement used to gauge the meeting point. This characteristic of contrast helps to define a whole new dimension from which sensation, meaning, cognition and consciousness can be analogised to the infinite forms between forms. At a time when the widest consensus in philosophy is the exhaustion of its central themes, the significance of such a hypothesis provides fresh impetus to revise some of the key meanings and concepts underpinning contemporary thought. To do this, the method explores the opposing themes of idealism and realism that run throughout western philosophy from Plato to the Speculative turn. This book will be of interest to professional academic audiences in the humanities and social sciences, from graduates to senior scholars. It will also be an interesting read to anyone wishing to keep abreast of developments in continental philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, and the sociology of knowledge.

Polyptych: Adaptation, Television, and Comics

Edited by Reginald Wiebe, Concordia University of Edmonton

April 2021 / ISBN: 978-1-64889-130-4
Availability: In stock
219pp. ¦ $54 £40 €46

Through each of its chapters, 'Polyptych: Adaptation, Television, and Comics' examines the complex dynamics of adapting serialized texts. The transmedial adaptation of collaborative and unstable texts does not lend itself to the same strategies as other, more static adaptations such as novels or plays. Building off the foundational work of Linda Hutcheon and Gérard Genette, Polyptych considers the analogy of adaptation as a palimpsest—a manuscript page that has been reused, leaving traces of the previous work behind—as needing to be reevaluated. A polyptych is a multi-panel artwork and provides a new model for analyzing how adaptation works when translating collaborative and unstable texts. Given that most television and comic books are episodic and serialized, and considering that both media are also the cumulative work of many artists, this book offers a series of distanced readings to reassess how adaptation works in this field. Comic book adaptations on television are plentiful and are nearly completely ignored in critical discussions of adaptation. This collection focuses on texts that fall outside the most common subjects of study among the corpus and contributes to expanding the field of inquiry. The book features texts that are subjects of previous academic interest, as well as studies of texts that have never before been critically considered. It also includes an appendix that provides the first list of comic book adaptations on North American television. 'Polyptych' is a unique and timely contribution to dynamic and growing fields of study. The book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of Comic Studies, Adaptation Studies, and Critical Media Studies more broadly, as well as to students undertaking courses on these subjects. It will also appeal to comic book and pop culture fans who wish to expand their knowledge on the subject.