Liverpool University Press Transvisuality - The Cultural Dimension of Visuality: v. I: Boundaries and Creative Openings: 1

In the passage from new media and tabloid culture, over political spin, branding and experience economy, to city scapes, design, and art in contemporary society, visual culture-visuality, 'the visual', 'the image world'-is a key denominator. The book is the first volume of the project Transvisuality in three volumes, initiated by University of Copenhagen and Liverpool University Press. It collects leading scholars from all parts of the world in a scrutiny of what the visual means today. It builds on the debates on visual culture and visuality in the past decades studies of culture, but expands on these debates from the perspectives of theory, analysis and design. It shows how the visual impacts on the current world and transcends the most different aspects of the social: how the visual becomes transvisual by adapting and creating culture in the global, translocal world. It ultimately addresses the pervasive but puzzling claim of contemporary research that 'the world has become more visual' and tries to answer it. In the first volume the issue of the dimension of the visual is a paramount theme, seen from different interdisciplinary angles. Whether approaches are prone to nominalism and discourse or to issues of cognition and framing, the question of what the visual is and what impacts may pertain to it remains a fundamental challenge to cultural research. Review Recommended. Graduate students through faculty/researchers. Choice, vol. 51 no. 07 About the Author Notes on Contributors Chiara Cappelletto is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at the Universita degli Studi in Milan, Italy. Her research focuses on the philosophy of image, visual culture and aesthetics of theatre, paying particular attention to the latest findings in neuroscience. She has written several articles on the role of fiction and make-believe in the construction of the spectatorial relationship. Her publications include Figure della rappresentazione: gesto e citazione in Bertolt Brecht e Walter Benjamin, Milano 2002; Il rito delle pulci. Wittgenstein morfologo, Milano 2004 (IX Castiglioncello Prize for Philosophy, youth section); Neuroestetica. L'arte del cervello, Roma - Bari 2009. Eduardo de la Fuente teaches in the Sociology Program, Flinders University, Adelaide Australia. He recently published a book entitled, Twentieth Century and the Question of Modernity (Routledge, 2011) and co-edited with Peter Murphy, Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Modernity (Brill, 2010). Recent articles in journals such as Classical Sociology, Sociological Theory, Cultural Sociology and the Journal of Sociology have focused on Simmel and aesthetics of social life; the current state of the sociology of arts; and Classicism and Romanticism in the social sciences. At the moment he is working on two major projects: a book on the 'social sciences and art theory' that seeks to bring disciplines like sociology into dialogue with art history, philosophical and empirical aesthetics; and an empirical research project regarding the rise of 'neomodernism' in contemporary architecture and design, and associated lifestyle media. Nicoletta Isar is Associate Professor at the Institute of Art History, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at Copenhagen University. She has studied in Bucharest, Paris, and Toronto, and she hold 3 degrees (International Relations; Arts; Musicology -Violin performance), and a doctorate (docteur es lettres) in Byzantine studies (Sorbonne, Paris IV, 1996). Her research areas spans from Comparative studies in the history of mentalities to Ritual Performances and Anthropology of Image. Recently she became interested in phenomena of saturated vision, changes in perception of time, and the transvisual, within the anthropological frame underlying transformations in vision, time, space and body. Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches Modern European Intelle