Embodied Visions presents a groundbreaking analysis of film through the lens of bioculturalism, revealing how human biology as well as human culture determine how films are made and experienced. Throughout his study, Torben Grodal uses the breakthroughs of modern brain science to explain central features of film aesthetics and to construct a general model of aesthetic experience-what he terms the PECMA flow model-that demonstrates the movement of information and emotions in the brain when viewing film. Examining a wide array of genres-animation, romance, pornography, fantasy, horror-from evolutionary and psychological perspectives, Grodal also reflects on social issues at the intersection of film theory and neuropsychology. These include moral problems in film viewing, how we experience realism and character identification, and the value of the subjective forms that cinema uniquely elaborates.

Bridget Riley's Op art paintings are icons of the 1960s, and fascinate art lovers as much now as they did then. Their central position in the art history of the period has not been generally explored, however - until now.

We rarely give thought to our bodies until faced with a physical challenge or crisis. We have somehow internalized the unbiblical idea that the immaterial aspect of our being (our soul or spirit) is inherently good while the material aspect (our body) is at worst inherently evil and at best neutral--just a vehicle for our souls to get around. So we end up neglecting or disparaging our bodies, seeing them as holding us back from spiritual growth and longing for the day we will be free of them. But the thing is, we don't have bodies; we are our bodies. And God created us that way for a reason. With Scripture as his guide, theologian Gregg Allison presents a holistic theology of the human body from conception through eternity to equip us to address pressing contemporary issues related to our bodies, including how we express our sexuality, whether gender is inherent or constructed, the meaning of suffering, body image, end of life questions, and how to live as whole people in a fractured world.

Embodied Vision delves into a series of representations Fatehpur Sikri has been subjected to and concludes that its space is revealed more through perception than geometry.

Do liminal embodied experiences such as illness, death and dying affect literary form? In recent years, the concept of embodiment has been theorized from various perspectives. Gender studies have been concerned with the cultural implications of embodiment, arguing to move away from viewing the body as a prediscursive phenomenon to regarding it as an acculturated body. Age studies have extended this view to the embodied experience of ageing, while drawing attention to the ways in which the ageing body, through its materiality and plasticity, restricts the possibilities of (de)constructing subjectivity. These current debates on embodiment find a strong counterpart in literary representation. The contributions to this anthology investigate how and to what extend physical borderline experiences affect literary form.

"Tracing a dynamic genealogy of performance from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, McMillian contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self-objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment."--Back cover.

"Exploring a dazzling variety of religious imagery, David Morgan shows how vision functions as an active, physical process, embedded in bodily experience and profoundly shaped by social practice. Morgan's bold, thoughtful interpretations will fascinate art historians and students of visual culture as well as historians of religion.” -Pepe Karmel, Department of Art History, New York University "The Embodied Eye is an important and truly groundbreaking book. It represents a substantive and quite fascinating extension of David Morgan's previous work- especially as it impressively shows us how 'seeing' is the primary medium of social life, and materially integrates the body of the individual and the body of the group. Morgan is unquestionably the pioneering theorist in the whole emergent field of Visual and Culture Studies as it relates to religion and art." -Norman Girardot, University Distinguished Professor, Lehigh University “Under David Morgan’s inspiring guidance, readers are taken on a dazzling journey through religious images that mediate worlds of faith. Embedding vision in the body, this book stands out with its thought-provoking approach to religious media as material and embodied interfaces that underpin the social construction of the sacred.” -Birgit Meyer, Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University

In Papua New Guinea, "spirit boards," also known as gope, were carved from wood by important men of an extended family or clan. Made from discarded canoes and usually decorated with carved and painted designs on one side, these boards vary greatly in style. At the turn of the 20th century, when most of the boards featured here were collected, men lived apart from women and uninitiated boys; their houses had designated areas or shrines created to display items, such as spirit boards, that indicated personal status and clan identity. Embodied Spirits is the first book devoted exclusively to spirit boards. Full-page photographs illustrate the boards of each region, and historical photographs show them in situ. The book also includes original essays by two noted scholars of Papuan Gulf art.

The Game Boy Advance platform as computational system and cultural artifact, from its 2001 release through hacks, mods, emulations, homebrew afterlives. In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan “Who Are You?”—asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players' nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly two decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendo's Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emulate, make, break, remake, redesign, trade, use, love, and play with the platform. In this book Alex Custodio traces the network of hardware and software afterlives of the Game Boy Advance platform. Each chapter considers a component of this network—hardware, software, peripheral, or practice—that illuminates the platform's unique features as a computational system and a cultural artifact. Examining the evolution of the design and architecture of Nintendo's handhelds and home consoles, and the constraints imposed on developers and players, for example, Custodio finds that Nintendo essentially embeds nostalgia into its hardware. She explores Nintendo's expansion of the platform through interoperability; physical and affective engagement with the Game Boy Advance; portability, private space, and social interaction; the platformization of nostalgia; fan-generated content including homebrew, hacking, and hardware modding; and e-waste—the final afterlife of consumer electronics. Although the Game Boy Advance is neither the most powerful nor the most popular of Nintendo's handhelds, Custodio argues, it is the platform that most fundamentally embodies Nintendo's reliance on the aesthetics and materiality of nostalgia.

Curriculum Visions challenges the singular, guiding vision that has dominated Western educational thought for the past four centuries, from Peter Ramus to Ralph Tyler and beyond. Influenced by the spirit of John Dewey, Curriculum Visions moves beyond his ghost to see what he never saw - a playful integration of the scientific, the storied, and the spiritful. In so doing, Curriculum Visions asks each of us to develop our own curricular vision, based on the logic of reason, the personality and culture of society, and the awesomeness and mystery of creation.