Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent—one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art. At a moment when university curriculums are everywhere being driven by scientism and market forces, Elegy for Theory advances a rigorous argument for the importance of the arts and humanities as transformative, self-renewing cultural legacies.

Rhetorically charged debates over theory have divided scholars of the humanities for decades. In Elegy for Theory, D. N. Rodowick steps back from well-rehearsed arguments pro and con to assess why theory has become such a deeply contested concept. Far from lobbying for a return to the "high theory" of the 1970s and 1980s, he calls for a vigorous dialogue on what should constitute a new, ethically inflected philosophy of the humanities. Rodowick develops an ambitiously cross-disciplinary critique of theory as an academic discourse, tracing its historical displacements from ancient concepts of theoria through late modern concepts of the aesthetic and into the twentieth century. The genealogy of theory, he argues, is constituted by two main lines of descent--one that goes back to philosophy and the other rooted instead in the history of positivism and the rise of the empirical sciences. Giving literature, philosophy, and aesthetics their due, Rodowick asserts that the mid-twentieth-century rise of theory within the academy cannot be understood apart from the emergence of cinema and visual studies. To ask the question, "What is cinema?" is to also open up in new ways the broader question of what is art.

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like. Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

As almost every aspect of making and viewing movies is replaced by digital technologies, even the notion of "watching a film" is fast becoming an anachronism. With the likely disappearance of celluloid film stock as a medium, and the emergence of new media, what will happen to cinema--and to cinema studies? In the first of two books exploring this question, Rodowick considers the fate of film and its role in the aesthetics and culture of the twenty-first century.

"Gives a superb critical and polemical overview of the '70s film theory. Rodowick is particularly good at showing both the political stakes of these influential theories and their blind spots."—Constance Penley, University of California, Santa Barbara

The single most comprehensive study of elegy, this Handbook offers groundbreaking scholarship, historical breadth, and responds to recent exciting developments in elegy studies: the explosion in interest in elegies about AIDS, cancer, and war; the reconsideration of the role of women; and elegy's relation to ethics, philosophy, and theory.

A collection of poems centered around life in Appalachia addresses topics ranging from the marginalization of the region's people to the environmental degradation it has endured throughout history.

"Bell's work is a concoction of the surreal and the hyper-real, the hilarious and the devastating."—The New Yorker "One of the most tonally versatile young poets working today."—Boston Review "A contemporary knockout, Bell's poems run the gamut of good: they're seriously funny, bizarre, wry, ambitious, acrobatic, gorgeous. Sometimes they have zombies."—Flavorwire Joshua Bell's unnerving and darkly funny second collection of poems inhabits various personae—including a prominent series starring the garrulous and aging rock star Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe—through which he examines paranoid, misogynist, and murderous elements within contemporary American culture. Throughout are prose "movie poems" that feature zombies, a summer camp slasher, exorcism, and courtroom drama. From "The Creature": Like many humans, I enjoy lifting small, living things. Your wife qualifies, but doesn't like to be lifted. I guess it's probably because, as is true with many humans, your wife doesn't want to be eaten, and often we are lifted, by the bigger thing, right before it drops us on a rock and eats us. I understand, I say to your wife, lowering her body to the kitchen floor, her legs bending slowly as she takes back the weight I've returned to her, like an astronaut moving back into the gravity of the capsule… Josh Bell earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the creative writing faculty at Columbia University and is currently Briggs Copeland Lecturer at Harvard.

In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change. Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at the margins of this poetic discourse—mistresses, rivals, enslaved characters, overlooked members of households—their own identities, even when they do not speak. She demonstrates how the three poets create a prominent aesthetic of corporeal abjection and imperfection, associating the body as much with blood, wounds, and corporeal disintegration as with elegance, refinement, and sensuality.

In recent decades, literary studies have shown great interest in issues concerning the elements of narrative. Narratology, with its most vocal exponents in the writings of Bal, Genette, and Ricoeur, has also emerged as an increasingly important aspect of classical scholarship. However, studies have tended to focus on genres that are deemed straightforwardly narrative in form, such as epic, history, and the novel. This volume of heretofore unpublished essays explores how theories of narrative can promote further understandings and innovative readings of a genre that is not traditionally seen as narrative: Roman elegy. While elegy does not tell a continuous story, it does contain many embedded tales—narratives in their own right—located within and interacting with the primarily nonnarrative structure of the external frame-text. Latin Elegy and Narratology is the first volume entirely dedicated to the analysis of Latin elegy through the prism of theories of narrative. It brings together an international range of classicists whose specialties include Roman elegy, Augustan literature more generally, and critical theory. Among the questions explored in this volume are: Can the inset narratives of elegy, with their distinctive narrative strategies, provide the key to a poetics of elegiac story telling? In what ways does elegy renegotiate the linearity and teleology of narrative? Can formal theories of narratology help to make sense of the temporal contradictions and narrative incongruities that so often characterize elegiac stories? What can the reception of Roman elegy tell us about narratives of unity, identity, and authority? The essays contained in this volume provide provocative new readings and an enhanced understanding of Roman elegy using the tools of narratology.