"An exploration of the habits of the modern era beside cultural notions discovering brain function and the nervous system to be central to health and illness. It looks at debates within neurology and culture through neurological works, popular advice, and the appearance of neurological disorders within the aesthetic artefacts of modernity"--Provided by publisher.

Friedrich Kittler was one of the world s most influential, provocative and misunderstood media theorists. His work spans analyses of historical discourse networks inspired by French poststructuralism, influential theorizations of new media, through to musings on music and mathematics. Always controversial and relentlessly unpredictable, Kittler s work is a major reference point for contemporary media theory, literary criticism and cultural studies. This is the only book of essays currently available in English on an important thinker whose influence across disciplines is growing. The volume situates Kittler s ideas, explaining and critiquing his sometimes difficult writing, and using his theories to undertake innovative readings of old and new media. It also includes previously untranslated work by Kittler himself. Contributors include Caroline Bassett, Steven Connor, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. Hansen, John Durham Peters and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.

Friedrich Kittler was one of the world s most influential, provocative and misunderstood media theorists. His work spans analyses of historical discourse networks inspired by French poststructuralism, influential theorizations of new media, through to musings on music and mathematics. Always controversial and relentlessly unpredictable, Kittler s work is a major reference point for contemporary media theory, literary criticism and cultural studies. This is the only book of essays currently available in English on an important thinker whose influence across disciplines is growing. The volume situates Kittler s ideas, explaining and critiquing his sometimes difficult writing, and using his theories to undertake innovative readings of old and new media. It also includes previously untranslated work by Kittler himself. Contributors include Caroline Bassett, Steven Connor, Alexander R. Galloway, Mark B. Hansen, John Durham Peters and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.

As people of the modern era were singularly prone to nervous disorders, the nervous system became a model for describing political and social organization. This volume untangles the mutual dependencies of scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of the period 1800-1950, exploring how and why modernity was a fundamentally nervous state.

Reads Beckett's comic timing as part of a post war ethics of representation. Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together? Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose and the late plays, this book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be. Presents innovative readings of the comedy found in Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings; spans Beckett's entire oeuvre, using published and unpublished sources; engages with recent and contemporary philosophical approaches to literature, including work by Derrida, Badiou, Levinas, and Adorno; makes a unique contribution to theoretical work on comedy and laughter and provides a rigorous introduction to the theoretical debates surrounding the relationship between modernist literature and a post war ethics of representation.