"Anyone who looks beyond the bestseller lists can see that the literary landscape outside its commercial walls is just as varied as that of visual art, just as wild, just as conceptual: novels in the form of dioramas, narratives read through virtual-reality glasses, or told as a series of tweets, stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting, genetic code, pixels, skin-as well as print and sound. The 100+ prose works and poems that make up Conceptualisms all have the strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it into literature. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what makes writing literature, and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature conceptual. Experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, anti- or new literature.... Across the years, a variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry and hybrid writing that, like conceptual visual art, foregrounds its ideas, explores new forms, challenges mainstream writing traditions, strives for ways to speak to the present. Along with whatever else they do, they ask, Why isn't this also literature?-and keep the boundaries of literature flexible and unresolved. Now, for the first time, here is an anthology that offers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. The first major anthology of this other tradition, Conceptualisms presents writing by over 90 authors, across three generations, representing a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to their subjects. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped the nature of contemporary writing, such Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. They'll also find authors, and responses to the canon, that they haven't yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live"--

What is conceptual writing, how does it differ from Conceptual Art, what are some of the dominant forms of conceptualism,where does an impure or hybrid conceptualism fit in, what about the baroque, what about the prosody of procedure, what are the links between appropriation and conceptual writing, how does conceptual writing rely on a new way of reading, a "thinkership" that can shift the focus away from the text and onto the concept, what is the relationship between conceptual writing and technology or information culture, and why has this tendency taken hold in the poetry community now? What follows, then, is a collection of notes, aphorisms, quotes and inquiries on conceptual writing. Notes on Conceptualisms is far from a definitive text, and much closer to a primer, a purposefully incomplete starting place, where readers, hopefully, can enter so as to participate in the shaping of these ideas. "For those not familiar with conceptualist practices in poetry, I can recommend few better places to start than Notes on Conceptualisms." --Thom Donovan for Bomblog

Conceptualism and Materiality. Matters of Art and Politics underscores the significance of materials and materiality within Conceptual art and conceptualism more broadly. It challenges the notion of conceptualism as an idea-centered, anti-materialist enterprise, and highlights the political implications thereof. The essays focus on the importance of material considerations for artists working during the 1960s and 1970s in different parts of the world. In reconsidering conceptualism’s neglected material aspects, the authors reveal the rich range of artistic inquiries into theoretical and political notions of matter and material. Their studies revise and diversify the account of this important chapter in the history of twentieth-century art - a reassessment that carries wider implications for the study of art and materiality in general .

Paul Gilbert brings together an international line-up of leading scholars and researchers in the field to provide a state-of-the-art exploration of key areas in compassion research and applications. Compassion can be seen as a core element of prosocial behaviour, and explorations of the concepts and value of compassion have been extended into different aspects of life including physical and psychological therapies, schools, leadership and business. While many animals share abilities to be distress sensitive and caring of others, it is our newly evolved socially intelligent abilities that make us capable of knowingly and deliberately helping others and purposely developing skills and wisdom to do so. This book generates many research questions whilst exploring the similarity and differences of human compassion to non-human caring and looks at how compassion changes the brain and body, affects genetic expression, manifests at a young age and is then cultivated (or not) by the social environment. Compassion: Concepts, Research and Applications will be essential reading for professionals, researchers and scholars interested in compassion and its applications in psychology and psychotherapy.

How should one approach the notion of the precarious in art – its meanings and its outcomes? Its presence in artistic practices may be transient, yet it instigates permanent changes in the production, discourse, and perception of art. The Permanence of the Transient: Precariousness in Art gathers essays that examine the traces and implications of precariousness in contemporary art, and lays a foundation for a thoughtful study of its emergence in related fields throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The different perspectives represented in this volume touch on art history and theory, curatorial practice, media art, philosophy, language, and transnational studies, and highlight artists’ narratives. Together, these interdisciplinary essays locate precariousness as an undercurrent in contemporary art and a connective tissue across diverse areas of knowledge and everyday life.

This book examines Uncreative Writing—the catch-all term to describe Neo-Conceptualism, Flarf and related avant-garde movements in contemporary North American poetry—against a decade of controversy. David Kaufman analyzes texts by Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman, Ara Shirinyan, Craig Dworkin, Dan Farrell and Katie Degentesh to demonstrate that Uncreative Writing is not a revolutionary break from lyric tradition as its proponents claim. Nor is it a racist, reactionary capitulation to neo-liberalism as its detractors argue. Rather, this monograph shows that Uncreative Writing’s real innovations and weaknesses become clearest when read in the context of the very lyric that it claims to have left behind.

The End of Diversity in Art Historical Writing is the most globally informed book on world art history, drawing on research in 76 countries. In addition some chapters have been crowd sourced: posted on the internet for comments, which have been incorporated into the text. It covers the principal accounts of Eurocentrism, center and margins, circulations and atlases of art, decolonial theory, incommensurate cultures, the origins and dissemination of the "October" model, problems of access to resources, models of multiple modernisms, and the emergence of English as the de facto lingua franca of art writing.

This reference presents both fundamental and advanced topics and related to Web operations. Using an integrated approach, the authors describe the basics as well as latest trends in the area. They cover agent-based Web, wrapper induction, Web mining, information retrieval, Web knowledge management, and social networks. The text includes a host of examples and over 100 illustrations that clarify complex material. It also contains many bibliographical notes, end-of-chapter exercises, glossaries, and practice questions with solutions/hints.

After Taste is an inquiry into a field of study dedicated to the reconsideration, reconstruction and rehabilitation of the concept of Taste. Taste is the category, whose systematic, historical and actual dimensions have traditionally been located in a variety of disciplines. The actuality and potential of the study is based on a variety of collected facts from readings and experiences, which materialize in the following features: One concept (figurative Taste), two thinking traditions (analytic and synthetic/continental) and three interrelated dimensions (systematic, historic and actual) are presented in three parts or volumes. As such, the study presents a salient comprehensive companion for wider readership of humanities approaching conceptions of Taste for the first time. Moreover, After Taste is intended for anyone who hopes to make a further contribution to the subject. Since its appearance and apparently short triumph some 250 years ago, the concept of non-literary Taste remained the linchpin of aesthetic theory and practice, but also a category outreaching aesthetics. Taste as the personal unity of the production, theory and criticism of art and literature, which was still largely taken as a given in the eighteenth century, has meanwhile given way to a highly-differentiated art world, in which aesthetic discourse is placed in such a way that it can seemingly no longer have a conceptual or linguistic effect on general opinion making. After Taste fills the gaps of systematic research by a comprehensive tracing of the emergence of the doctrines, discourses and disciplinary dimensions of Taste up to the peak of its systematic and historical trajectory in the eighteenth century and onwards into the present day. The guiding goal is a post-disciplinary rehabilitation of the contested category as a preparation for its productive usage in emerging academic and popular contexts. It shows how the category of Taste became the foundation, legitimation and the catalyst for the emerging division of labour, faculties and disciplines, confirming the hypothesis of the immense impact and actuality of Taste in the contemporary world.