A thoroughly updated edition of the witty and engaging exploration of the history, application, and tenets of literary theory in ten lessons. The first edition of Ten Lessons served as a “literary” introduction to theoretical writing, a strong set of pedagogical prose poems unpacking Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, Marxism, cultural studies, feminism, gender studies, and queer theory. Calvin Thomas returns to these ten “lessons,” each based on an axiomatic sentence selected from the canons of theory, each exploring the basic assumptions and motivations of theoretical writing. But while every lesson explains the working terms and core tenets of theory, each also attempts to exemplify theory as a “liberatory practice” (bell hooks), to liberate theory as a “practice of creativity” (Foucault) in and of itself. Features: - Critical keywords bolded for easy reference - Expanded footnotes with detailed discussion of key concepts - Anti-racist overhaul of each lesson in the wake of Trumpism, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo - Urgent emphasis on Afropessimism, critical race theory, and other developments in postcolonial Black cultural production - Designed to cross-reference with: Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology, edited by Calvin Thomas The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo The Bloomsbury Handbook to 21st Century Feminist Theory, edited by Robin Truth Goodman The revised, updated, and expanded second edition, featuring 25% new material, still argues for theoretical writing as a genre of creative writing, a way of engaging in the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble, that desire to make radical changes in very fabrication of social reality.

American Disaster Movies of the 1970s is the first scholarly book dedicated to the disaster cycle that dominated American cinema and television in the 1970s. Through examining films such as Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Two-Minute Warning (1976) and The Swarm (1978), alongside their historical contexts and American contemporaneous trends, the disaster cycle is treated as a time-bound phenomenon. This book further contextualises the cycle by drawing on the longer cultural history of modernist reactions to modern anxieties, including the widespread dependence on technology and corporate power. Each chapter considers cinematic precursors, such as the ‘ark movie’, and contemporaneous trends, such as New Hollywood, vigilante and blaxploitation films, as well as the immediate American context: the end of the civil rights and countercultural era, the Watergate crisis, and the defeat in Vietnam.As Scott Freer argues, the disaster movie is a modern, demotic form of tragedy that satisfies a taste for the macabre. It is also an aesthetic means for processing painful truths, and many of the dramatized themes anticipate present-day monstrosities of modernity.

The first comprehensive scrutiny of the theories associated with new materialisms including speculative realism, new materialism, Object-oriented ontology and actor-network theory. One of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last decades, new materialisms embody a critique of modernity and a pledge to regain immediate reality by focusing on the materiality of the world – human and nonhuman – rather than a post-structuralist focus upon texts. Against New Materialisms examines the theoretical and practical problems connected with discarding modernity and the human subject from a number of interdisciplinary angles: ontology and phenomenology to political theory, mythology and ecology. With contributions from international scholars, including Markus Gabriel, Andrew Cole, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, the essays here challenge the capacity of new materialisms to provide solutions to current international crises, whilst also calling into question what the desire for such theories can tell us about the global situation today.

In this global approach to climate change and freshwater access, Cameron Fioret explores the harmful effects of water commodification. Making use of deliberative democratic theory, Fioret suggests tools that can change the balance of democratic decision-making power by rethinking the governance of water more broadly. Five main case studies including Detroit, Cochabamba, and Kerala span four continents to convey the global and local scope of normative water issues. These examples draw on contemporary water justice movements to explore how anti-water-commodification struggles can utilize water recommoning practices to make water governance processes more deeply democratic. Highlighting the ethical and sociopolitical ramifications of water injustice, this study moves beyond the surface issue of distributional concerns. To this end, Fioret draws on research in democratic political theory and environmental philosophy to consider what right people have to water, the putative harms of privatizing and commodifying water, common ownership, and legal protections, alongside local and transnational political activism. In navigating these pressing issues, The Ethics of Water provides a searing analysis of water commodification and political domination today.

This book introduces the reader to the exciting new field of plant philosophy and takes it in a new direction to ask: what does it mean to say that plants are sexed? Do 'male' and 'female' really mean the same when applied to humans, trees, fungi and algae? Are the zoological categories of sex really adequate for understanding the - uniquely 'dibiontic' - life cycle of plants? Vegetal Sex addresses these questions through a detailed analysis of major moments in the history of plant sex, from Aristotle to the modern day. Tracing the transformations in the analogy between animals and plants that characterize this history, it shows how the analogy still functions in contemporary botany and asks: what would a non-zoocentric, plant-centred philosophy of vegetal sex be like? By showing how philosophy and botany have been and still are inextricably entwined, Vegetal Sex allows us to think vegetal being and, perhaps, to recognize the vegetal in us all.

What can philosophy teach us about cinema? Can cinema transform how we understand philosophy? How should we describe the competing approaches to philosophizing on film? New Philosophies of Film answers these questions by offering a lucid introduction to the exciting developments and contentious debates within the philosophy of film. Mapping out the conceptual terrain, it examines both analytic and continental approaches to cinema and puts forward a pluralist film philosophy, grounded in practical examples from film, documentaries and television series. Now thoroughly updated to showcase the most recent developments in the field, this 2nd edition features: · New chapters on phenomenology, cinematic ethics, philosophical documentary film and television as philosophy, incorporating feminist, socio-political, ethical and ecological approaches to cinema · Contemporary case studies including Carol, Roma, Melancholia, two Derrida documentaries, and the Netflix series Black Mirror · Expanded coverage of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, two of the most influential philosophers of film · An updated bibliography, filmography and reading lists, with links to online resources to support further study Demonstrating how the film-philosophy encounter can open up new paths for thinking, New Philosophies of Film is an essential resource for putting interdisciplinary inquiry into practice.