Maria Tomasula’s still life paintings are absolutely captivating, dramatizing luscious objects of saturated colors and meticulous details through the spotlight effect against a dark backdrop. Beyond their immediate appeal, however, the still lifes usually contain disturbing features such as flowers being sharply pierced by hooks and nails or isolated body parts such as bones and organs that seem to be fiercely alive. Although the pictures are materialistically appealing due to the illusionistic style of the artist, they lend themselves to a depth of iconography that has not been accounted for in previous writings on her art. This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Tomasula (b. 1958), unraveling her complex iconography that is founded on her Mexican American heritage and Catholicism, but also tracing the European still life tradition. It shows that her paintings reflect her feminist and philosophical leanings influenced by various intellectuals including Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and the proponents of New Materialism. Her still life converges the old with new interests: it pays tribute to traditional Mexican and European motifs, but also reflects ideas and mannerism that speak to the contemporary audience. This research evidences the complexity of the Mexican American experience which merges divergent cultural and ideological perspectives from Latin America, North America, and Europe in varied ways for different and unique individuals.

Maria Tomasula's still life paintings are absolutely captivating, dramatizing luscious objects of saturated colors and meticulous details through the spotlight effect against a dark backdrop. Beyond their immediate appeal, however, the still lifes usually contain disturbing features such as flowers being sharply pierced by hooks and nails or isolated body parts such as bones and organs that seem to be fiercely alive. Although the pictures are materialistically appealing due to the illusionistic style of the artist, they lend themselves to a depth of iconography that has not been accounted for in previous writings on her art. This book is the first comprehensive monograph on Tomasula (b. 1958), unraveling her complex iconography that is founded on her Mexican American heritage and Catholicism, but also tracing the European still life tradition. It shows that her paintings reflect her feminist and philosophical leanings influenced by various intellectuals including Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and the proponents of New Materialism. Her still life converges the old with new interests: it pays tribute to traditional Mexican and European motifs, but also reflects ideas and mannerism that speak to the contemporary audience. This research evidences the complexity of the Mexican American experience which merges divergent cultural and ideological perspectives from Latin America, North America, and Europe in varied ways for different and unique individuals.

Steve Tomasula's work exists at the cutting edges of scientific knowledge and literary techniques. As such, it demands consideration from multiple perspectives and from critics who can guide the reader through the formal innovations and multimedia involutions while providing critical scientific, aesthetic, historical, and technical contexts. This book, the first of its kind, provides this framework, showing readers the richness and relevance of the worlds Tomasula constructs. Steve Tomasula's work is redefining the form of the novel, reinventing the practice of reading, and wrestling with the most urgent questions raised by massive transformations of media and biotechnologies. His work not only charts these changes, it formulates the problems that we have making meaning in our radically changing technological contexts. Vast in scope, inventive in form, and intimate in voice, his novels, short stories, and essays are read and taught by a surprisingly diverse array of scholars in fields ranging from contemporary experimental writing and literary criticism to the history of science, biotechnology and bioart, book studies, and digital humanities.

In this collection of essays, a group of theologians, artists, and historians explore Geogres Roualt's historical context, personal suffering, and biblical themes, showing how his prophetic creativity continue to inspire artists and thinkers today. Chapters are interspersed with original artistic responses in the form of imagery and poetry.

A stunning new collection of stories by a master fictionist, Once Human shows the ways to go beyond standard maps of simple understanding

Innovative poetry, philosophy, theology and new sciences converge in the project of rewriting the word "God" In Rewriting the Word "God," Romana Huk examines the substantive connections between innovative poetry of the last century and contemporary theology and philosophy. Along the way, we encounter ten poets who have, without abandoning their inherited or chosen faith traditions, radically rethought conceptualizations of divinity, human ontology, and the real. From the startlingly proto-phenomenological encounters with nature by Gerard Manley Hopkins to the post-deconstructive pursuit of "oracular" speech in Fanny Howe, these poets have found inspiration in a wide range of sources, from ancient religious texts to modern philosophical movements. But what unites them is their willingness to continually change, experiment and challenge the status quo, both in their religious beliefs and their poetic practice. Huk shows how these poets have used their work to explore ultimate questions of life and death, meaning and purpose, and the relationship between humans and materiality, humans and other humans, which for these poets sheds light on humanity's relationship with the divine. She also highlights the ways in which they have engaged with social and political issues in their poetry to speak out against injustice and oppression. Rewriting the Word "God" is a thought-provoking and inspiring work that will challenge current perceptions of both religion and poetry from new positions at the intersection of faith, art, philosophy, science, literary theory, and culture.

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket.