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Book Cover
Book
Author Wills, David, 1953-

Title Prosthesis / David Wills
Published Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1995

Copies

Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 W'PONDS  809.9357 W7412/P  AVAILABLE
Description 350 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Series Meridian : crossing aesthetics
Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)
Contents Machine derived contents note: 1. Hamilton, 1970 -- 2. Mentone, 1888 -- 3. Africa, 21st century -- 4. Berchtesgaden, 1929 -- 5. Paris, 1976 -- 6. Rome, 1985 -- 7. Cambridge, 1553 -- 8. Menton, 1921 -- 9. Geneva, 1978 -- Notes -- Works cited
Summary Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction, it finds an artistic or cultural pretext for each of its expositions - a line from Virgil, a painting by Conder, a theory by Freud, a film by Greenaway, a text by Derrida, novels by Roussel or Gibson, a sixteenth-century rhetoric - that connects thematically or theoretically with the question of prosthesis
Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyzes and performs certain questions about the body as an "artificial" construction. The book deals with the mechanical (e.g., a mechanical prosthesis like a father's artificial leg) in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic - in order to demonstrate to what extent a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. It is distinguished from a thematics of the prosthetic in literature by its complex articulation with accounts of the amputee father's discomfort, slipping back and forth between an apparently constative and a more obviously performative mode, in and out of fiction and autobiography
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 343-350)
Notes Includes one essay in French
Subject Criticism.
Literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.
Literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, ewc
LC no. 94042467
ISBN 0804724598 (alk. paper)
0804724601 (paperback: alk. paper)