The book is a part of growing literature on human embodiment and attempts to answer the question of the role of the body in the construction of identity in consumer culture. The book examines two related spheres: the centrality and marginality of cultural practices. The phenomena discussed include cosmetic surgery, Modern Primitivism, photographs by Matuschka and projects by French multimedia artist Orlan. The aim of the book is to postulate that in the present conditions of the fragmentation and disintegration of subjectivity, the body may be employed in a strategy of identification. Practices of body modification, performed both in the centre and in the margins of culture, reveal the ways in which identity is constructed, experienced and negotiated. By presenting the body as a site for the construction of identity, the study adds to the ongoing discussion about the status of individual identity and the identity of western culture.
The book is an artistic project of the artbook type which is the collaboration between graphic artists from Poland and the United Kingdom and the author of the texts. The project is inspired by medieval art and by various literary forms of the period. The main motif of the artbook’s coherent visual and textual narration is a quest for identity – the mission of a brotherhood of knights. This lavishly illustrated artbook contains original, previously unpublished texts in English, which are composed on the principles of such medieval genres as chivalric romance, chronicle, gnomic texts and the poetic riddle.
Ever since the Renaissance urge to modernize enforced irreverent reading of ancient and classical texts, the European mind resisted complete secularization. The new dissociated sensibility followed the processes of formal as well as conceptual alchemization. The papers collected in this volume map a wide range of cultural and literary discourses, from Reformation theology to reader-response criticism to modern fiction.