Editions Rodopi BV is pleased to announce the
following new publications in Consciousness, Literature and the Arts Studies:
Screen Consciousness
Cinema, Mind and World.
Edited by Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt.
Amsterdam/New
York, NY 2006. 202 pp. (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 4)
ISBN-10:
90-420-2016-4 Paper € 40,-/US$52.-
ISBN-13:
978-90-420-2016-0
Online
info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CLA+4
This collection of essays is
driven by the question of how we know what we know, and in particular how we can
be certain about something even when we know it is an illusion. The contention
of the book is that this age-old question has acquired a new urgency as certain
trends in science, technology and ideas have taken the discussion of
consciousness out of the philosophy department and deposited it in the world at
large. As a consequence, a body of literature from many fields has produced its
own sets of concerns and methods under the rubric of Consciousness Studies.
Each contribution in this collection deals with issues and questions that
lots of people have been thinking about for many years in many different
contexts, things such as the nature of film, cinema, world, mind and so on.
Those of us fascinated by these diverse yet related issues may have often felt
we were working in a disciplinary no-man's-land. Now suddenly, it seems with
Consciousness Studies we have a coherent intellectual home - albeit one that is
self-consciously eclectic.
The
essays included in Screen
Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World are from a range of
disciplines — art, philosophy, film theory, anthropology and technology studies
— each represented by significant international figures, and each concerned
with how their field is being transformed by the new discipline of Consciousness
Studies. Together they attempt to reconcile the oncoming rush of new data from
science and technology about how we know what we know, with the insights gained
from the long view of history, philosophy and art. Each of the contributions
seeks to interpose Consciousness Studies between film and mind, where for
cultural theorists psychoanalysis had traditionally stood. This is more than
simply updating Film Studies or nodding in the direction of cognitive film
theory. Film, with all its sentient, sensuous and social qualities, is a common
reference point between all these forces, and Consciousness Studies provides
the intellectual impetus for this book to revisit familiar problems with fresh
insight.