The medical humanities were developed as a means of using the tools offered by several fields in the humanities – law, history, and literature among others – to improve or interrogate experiences of healthcare and patienthood. Humanities training for doctors, particularly, has been valued in that it encourages medics to listen to their patients […]
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As many current children’s films, immersed as they are in digital culture, fetishise an old book in an attic or a fairytale tome whose old illustrations come strangely to life, books as objects have begun to take on cultural freight as fossil traces of the human, even as we are still here, coining terms like […]
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What if middleness did not suppose progress?[1] What if, for example, instead of looking to discern a ‘premodernism’ and a ‘prehumanism’ that lead naturally to modernism and humanism and thence to postmodernism and posthumanism we imagined time as a vortex rather than a line? What if we abandoned human-centric narratives of history altogether, narratives […]
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As the era preceding the articulation of what has come to be known as humanism, the European Middle Ages offer a variety of vantage points from which to trouble present certainties, complicate contemporary narratives of what the human means, and set new trajectories for the future of posthumanist thought. The medieval period does not […]
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An enduring question about the human condition concerns the riddle of embodiment, or how to comprehend the very meat of our existence. Rembrandt’s famous painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, captures the quandary. It is 1632 in Holland and we are witness to the dissection of a criminal hanged earlier in the day. […]
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Bellmer and Virtual Assemblages The disturbing, uncanny works of the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) include drawings, sculptures, photographs, paintings, and poetic writings. Although the writings, due to their highly enigmatic style, are susceptible to multiple interpretations, they do offer several insights into the overall approach of this controversial artist to his work. Perhaps most […]
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