Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

by Vivian Sobchack

Overview

In these innovative essays, Vivian Sobchack considers the key role our bodies play in making sense of today's image-saturated culture. Emphasizing our corporeal rather than our intellectual engagements with film and other media, Carnal Thoughts shows how our experience always emerges through our senses and how our bodies are not just visible objects but also sense-making, visual subjects. Sobchack draws on both phenomenological philosophy and a broad range of popular sources to explore bodily experience in contemporary, moving-image culture. She examines how, through the conflation of cinema and surgery, we've all "had our eyes done"; why we are "moved" by the movies; and the different ways in which we inhabit photographic, cinematic, and electronic space. Carnal Thoughts provides a lively and engaging challenge to the mind/body split by demonstrating that the process of "making sense" requires an irreducible collaboration between our thoughts and our senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520241299
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/01/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	1690L (what's this?)

About the Author

Vivian Sobchack is Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Theater, Film, and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1997) and The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) and the editor of Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (2000) and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (1996), among other books.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction	1
Part I	Sensible Scenes
1	Breadcrumbs in the Forest: Three Meditations on Being Lost in Space	13
2	Scary Women: Cinema, Surgery, and Special Effects	36
3	What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh	53
4	The Expanded Gaze in Contracted Space: Happenstance, Hazard, and the Flesh of the World	85
5	"Susie Scribbles": On Technology, Techne, and Writing Incarnate	109
6	The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic "Presence"	135
Part II	Responsible Visions
7	Beating the Meat / Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of the Century Alive	165
8	Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions	179
9	A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality	205
10	Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary	226
11	The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness	258
12	The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity	286
	Index	319