Endorsements for Post-Cinematic Bodies

My book Post-Cinematic Bodies, coming soon from meson press, now has a great set of endorsements (blurbs) from three scholars that I greatly respect and admire: Rizvana Bradley, Francesco Casetti, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — a group of scholars that reflects the interdisciplinary conversation I hope to provoke across film and media studies, literary theory/philosophical aesthetics, and the study of gender and race in contemporary art and visual culture.

We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.

Francesco Casetti, Yale University

Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.

Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley

See the meson press website for more information.

Imagining Cinematic Transformation

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On Wednesday, May 8, 2013 (at 6:00 pm in room 608 in the Conti-Hochhaus), the Film & TV Reading Group will meet to discuss two texts relevant to the larger theme of “Imagining Cinematic Transformation” (part of a semester-long series of events detailed here). The texts are:

1) Francesco Casetti, “The Relocation of Cinema,” _NECSUS_ 2 (2012): online at http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-relocation-of-cinema/

2) Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, “Conclusion: digital cinema — the body and the senses refigured?”, in: _Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses_. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. 170-187.

We are always happy to welcome new participants to our informal discussion group! For more information, please contact Felix Brinker.