This study examines Tennyson's portrayals of the erotic and creative impulses, reading the poet's ubiquitous lover-artists as tropes that figure the desire for transcending the state of being human, a condition of personal fragmentation and limited knowledge. Ostensibly seeking to fulfill erotic wishes, construct utopias, or create grand artistic works, Tennyson's characters engage in a fundamentally spiritual quest, yearning to divine desire: to eternalize the fulfilment of their deepest wishes. Freud revealed how Victorians sublimated sexual desire into religious impulse. This book demonstrates, however, the remarkable way in which Tennyson's poems transact the opposing projection, transfiguring spiritual desire into erotic art. Brilliantly negotiating a middle ground between scientific skepticism and reactionary religiosity, his vastly popular poems suggest that fulfilment of "the wish too strong for words to name" lies in a sacramentality: only as means do art and eros allow transport beyond fragmentation. At a deep level, the poems conclude that language itself brokers transcendence through its very brokenness.

Over the course of the last century, the focus group has become an increasingly vital part of the way companies and politicians sell their products and policies. Few areas of life, from salad dressing to health care legislation to our favorite TV shows, have been left untouched by the questions put to controlled groups about what they do and don’t like. Divining Desire is the first-ever popular survey of this rich topic. In a lively, sweeping history, Liza Featherstone traces the surprising roots of the focus group in early-twentieth century European socialism, its subsequent use by the “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue, and its widespread deployment today. She also explores such famous “failures” of the method as the doomed launch of the Ford Edsel with its vagina shaped radiator grille, and the even more ill-fated attempt to introduce a new flavor of Coca Cola (which prompted street protests from devotees of the old formula). As elites have become increasingly detached from the general public, they rely ever more on focus groups, whether to win votes or to sell products. And, in a society where many feel increasingly powerless, the focus group has at least offered the illusion that ordinary people will be listened to and that their opinions count. Yet, it seems the more we are consulted, the less power we have. That paradox is particularly stark today, when everyone can post an opinion on social media—our 24 hour “focus group”—yet only plutocrats can shape policy. In telling this fascinating story, Featherstone raises profound questions about democracy, desire and the innermost workings of consumer society.

"I want us all to live with our genitals, heart and soul in happy harmony," Sequoia wrote. "I offer you my life as an open book."

What does sex have to do with God? What does God have to do with sex? Is sex feeling flat? one-dimensional? leaving you wanting more? Is your connection with spirit lacking? What if you could connect them together? Sequoia Thom, M.A., began grappling with these questions at an early age. His strict religious upbringing created a painful internal split between his lustful longing for male love and his equally strong desire to connect with spirit. That pain and shame drove him on a life-long quest to fathom the depths of both sex and spirit: to explore where they may be connected. He discovered that libido is like rocket fuel to open the heart and access the spirit. After a decade of in-depth study of Yoga and Tantra, at 35 he began offering Tantra massage and workshops teaching men how to spread the powerful pelvic charge into full-body bliss. In his deeply personal memoir, Sequoia shares all he learned over 50 years on his transformational journey, and offers it for your own transformation, so that you can: free yourself from any residue of sexual guilt or shame, deepen your own connection between your sex, heart, and soul; experience deeper love for yourself and others; explore sex with human partners as a form of worship of the formless universal Beloved; and glimpse the one pure consciousness that we all are at the deepest level. "I want us all to live with our genitals, heart and soul in happy harmony," he wrote. "I offer you my life as an open book." Are you ready to connect your own sex and spirit? Follow Sequoia's transformational life journey: your life will be better because of what you'll discover about you! "You're in the safest of sensitive hands. Sequoia Thom has a healer's touch, a poet's vision, the multi-ringed courage of a mighty first-growth tree, and an impeccable record for teaching people how to soar." from the Foreword by David Mielke

From the author's introduction: The title of this book contains a double entendre: its chapters look both at attempts to perfect desire in divine fashion and at the means by which Tennyson's poems try to divine' the nature of desire itself. The author argues that Tennyson's poems, his character

The poet's reputation has weathered even the most vitriolic attempts to discredit both the man and his writings; and as criticism of the late twentieth century demonstrates, Tennyson's claim to pre-eminence among the Victorians is now unchallenged."

Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh inform the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing on psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, and accompanying ideas in political theology, Juliet Rogers examines the language, imagery and excitement that accompanies recent initiatives to legislate against what is called 'female genital mutilation'. The author compliments this examination with a consideration of the scene of torture exposed in images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Rogers argues that the modes of fascination and excitement that accompany scenes of torture and female circumcision betray the fantasy of a political condition against which the subject of liberal law is imagined; this is subjectivity in a state of non-mutilation, non-prohibition or, in a psychoanalytic idiom, non-castration. To support the fantasy of this subject, the mutilated subject, the authors suggests, is rendered as flesh cut from the democratic nation state, deserving of only selective human rights, or none at all.

This comprehensive collection introduces and contextualizes media studies’ most influential texts and thinkers, from early 20th century mass communication to the first stages of digital culture in the 21st century. The volume brings together influential theories about media, mediation and communication, as well as the relationships between media, culture and society. Each chapter presents a close reading of a classic text, written by a contemporary media studies scholar. Each contributor presents a summary of this text, relates it to the traditions of ideas in media studies and highlights its contemporary relevance. The text explores the core theoretical traditions of media studies: in particular, cultural studies, mass communication research, medium theory and critical theory, helping students gain a better understanding of how media studies has developed under shifting historical conditions and giving them the tools to analyse their contemporary situation. This is essential reading for students of media and communication and adjacent fields such as journalism studies, sociology and cultural studies.

In Reimagining Life, Raihan Kadri presents a pioneering critical history of the epistemological and theoretical origins of the Surrealist movement and its subsequent legacy. The book contains extensive examination and new interpretations of the oft-neglected theoretical writing of Surrealists such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, and Salvador Dalí, in order to demonstrate how Surrealism is connected to a broader lineage of philiosophical pessimism-involving such figures as Fredrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud-which Kadri argues represents a particular strain of modernism aimed at breaking human thought away from the constraints of religion and other forms of idealism in order to expand the possibilities for knowledge and human freedom. The innovative, wide-ranging study deftly traverses fields of art, politics, philosophy, psychology, and literature. Reimagining Life redefines Surrealism's place in modern intellectual history and offers a new vision of how Surrealist discourse can be connected to contemporary debates in cultural, critical, and theoretical studies.