Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)
Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whi...
16 Jan 20151h 3min
Robert Hewison, “Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain” (Verso, 2014)
How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) cha...
19 Dec 201454min
Steven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)
To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollop...
12 Dec 20141h 2min
Beth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014)
It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth...
3 Dec 201441min
Sam Friedman, “Comedy and Distinction” (Routledge, 2014)
What is funny? What makes you laugh? We think of laughter as being universal idea that applies to everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender or social class. In Comedy and Distinction: The Cultu...
21 Nov 201447min
Bruce Fink, “Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key” (Routledge, 2014)
What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian...
17 Nov 20141h 2min
Randal Marlin, “Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion” (Broadview Press, 2013)
It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes t...
17 Nov 201441min
Bonnie J. Mann, “Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror” (OUP, 2014)
In the aftermath of 9/11, the American political landscape and its discourses took a peculiar turn. America’s national sovereignty-conceived as the expression of its indomitable masculinity-had been c...
12 Nov 201459min
