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This monograph explores the transformation of costume as significant aspect of modernist theatre, demonstrating its impact on performers and performance makers through the documentation of selected performances, including certain specific interactions between art and fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Michael Tomasello's new book, The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans, it posits a close relationship between agency and the evolution of animal and human behavior. Tomasello adopts an integrated perspective, tracing ancient animals to early humans within the constraints of social norms. This book details a fascinating journey through the evolution of agency, therein presenting an innovatively comprehensive framework for analyzing processes of decision-making and behavioral control. Given the current interest in establishing connections among evolving individual agency, we think this book is a timely contribution, particularly for multidisciplinary researchers looking into the domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Beckett and Embodiment, Amanda Dennis argues for an ecological rethinking of the concept of agency in Beckett, offering a powerful conceptual framework by which to reorganize poststructuralist, posthumanist and new materialist concerns. The book's central claim is that in his life-long engagement with embodiment Beckett invites us to disarticulate the concept of agency from intentionality and to redistribute it onto a space shaped by what Merleau-Ponty calls the body-subject. Beckett's prose reimagines agency as such a spatial phenomenon—irreducible to individual will and untethered from old mind-matter dichotomies. In developing this idea, Dennis reinvigorates the debate on agency in contemporary criticism by shifting the focus from questions of will, desire, and intention to figures of embodiment and lived space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a thought-provoking theory of sensorimotor agency and the pre-reflective experience of action that builds on the enactive notions of autonomy and sense-making. The account provided in this book fits into a radically embodied, enactive, and extended cognitive science. However, the notion of the environment requires further conceptual clarification by the enactive camp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the volume Preschool Bilingual Education: Agency in Interactions between Children, Teachers, and Parents. It briefly summarizes the content of the 12 chapters and comments on the insights and weaknesses of the volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lisa Tessman's new work is a re-purposing of her earlier academic monograph on moral failure for popular philosophy. It investigates the experiences of moral dilemma and being burdened with a strict moral duty which is impossible to meet. Tessman aims to show that these experiences are veridical, to explain how they arise in us by grounding them in important features of our nature and psychology, and to convince us that the risk of impossible moral binds is one that we should learn to live with. In all of this, she sees herself as recovering experiences of moral impossibility from modern, analytic ethical theory which operates on an over-intellectualized, rationalistic model of agency that takes such experiences to be illusory, incoherent or otherwise mistaken. I summarize the core arguments of the work, offer some friendly critical commentary, and raise some mild concerns about the project as a work in popular philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A philosophical account of self-knowledge should offer more than an epistemological explanation of first-personal privilege. It should also address the many cases where the first-person perspective is not so privileged, and account for the importance of self-knowledge to a person’s social and psychological well-being. Quassim Cassam’s Self-Knowledge for Humans and John Doris’s Talking to Our Selves both emphasize the importance of these latter tasks, but neither author is wholly successful: Cassam’s argument rests on a gross distortion of the “Rationalist” picture he sets up as a foil, and Doris’s on a skeptical argument that stands in some questionable company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article examines two important but critically neglected representations of ageing: Simone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse (1970) and, more briefly, Promenade au pays de la vieillesse (1974), a Swedish documentary film directed by Marianne Ahrne featuring Simone de Beauvoir and her philosophy on ageing. This article challenges the view that La Vieillesse provides a representative portrayal of the lived experience of ageing, arguing that the work focuses above all on male-authored literary accounts of the ageing process, with the voices of women surprisingly muted. It suggests that the inclusion of more individual women's positive experiences of the ageing process may have potentially undermined the thesis of the work. It goes on to propose that Beauvoir's drive to raise awareness of the social neglect of the aged, combined with her existential perspective, inhibits her ability to see ageing positively and thus to situate herself outside of a highly conventional aesthetics of ageing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Shelley's ‘Mont Blanc' as an extended exploration into possible modes of relationship linking the human mind to the material world. The modes of relationship considered by Shelley anticipate many of the structures and strategies developed by posthumanist theory, including structural coupling, strategic anthropomorphism, imagistic translation, and human-nonhuman assemblages. After summarizing Kantian and post-Kantian readings of ‘Mont Blanc,' the essay works through an extended close reading of the poem to elucidate its proto-posthumanist elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three books in this review are very different, but they illuminate one another in sharing strong themes of justice, rights and agency. Two books by lawyers on justice and mercy and on liberty and equality are linked to a book by a sociologist on children and agency. The review considers how practitioners, policy makers and researchers can work together to promote children's rights to justice and liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German-, Hebrew-, and English-language novels to develop a reading method-the 'hermeneutics of futurity'-that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshel emphasizes human agency to counter the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' that has long dominated a great deal of literary theory, and focuses on how novelists construct human choices and their consequences. He covers two generations of German-language novels spanning the Adenauer era to the present, and two generations of Israeli writers reflecting on 1948 and later, 1967. In order to develop fully the concept of futurity he also writes on recent American and English novels, often with implicitly political themes. The book succeeds in demonstrating the value of how various novelists read the past otherwise in order to reconstruct the present and future. At the same time, Eshel conceives human agency and 'choice' so capaciously that the book often neglects the institutional constraints on agency that afflict victims of traumas in particular. His treatment of Martin Walser's controversial fictionalized memoir is exemplary of this problem in an otherwise stimulating work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses online reader responses to the erotic fiction series Fifty Shades, and queries whether fans gain agency by talking about the books. Through the use of queer critical discourse analysis, we argue that fans of Fifty Shades typically acquiesce in the normative gender roles portrayed within the books, but that this facilitates their agency as sexual beings. In particular, we show how the readers in our sample do identity work around their own experiences as heterosexual women. Rather than focusing on representations of gender and sexuality in the novels, then, we argue that representation is best analysed not from a top-down perspective, but through an investigation of how discourses within texts are negotiated and put to use by their readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Woundscapes’ is an exhibition collaboratively produced by 11 anthropologists and artists from different countries, whose work focuses on the reproduction of particular gazes, stereotypes and individual memories that are all connected to respective diasporic dynamics. The works presented at the exhibition attempted to map different forms of dealing with, understanding and expressing ‘suffering’. The works examined individual and collective trajectories of ‘suffering’ and related ‘cure’ strategies in the healthcare market of Greater Lisbon, and different forms and tactics of legitimisation, resistance or reconceptualisation of social positions. The aim of this article is to 1) present the conceptual design of the research underpinning the exhibition; 2) explore the curatorial process of attempting to elude the very distance between object and representation, between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and, thus, to elude the ever-encompassing metaphor of the north–south divide, to give visitors the opportunity to creatively experience different paths of exclusion and integration, of distancing and participation; and 3) reflect on the state of liminality created by the exhibition, undermining the conventional categorical distinction between ethnography and art, and causing an interference in the established circuits of academia, and in those of contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article critiques the poem "Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie," by Edmund Spenser, particularly focusing on issues of causality within the poem. It comments on the role of fate, fortune, and the gods and their ability to change the lives of men, as well as discusses issues of personal agency.

This essay reviews Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism (2010) by Tobin Nellhaus. It begins by outlining the objective of the book and proceeds to evaluate its central argument. The objective is to develop a theory of theatre founded on the premises of critical realism and thereby theoretically situate theatrical performance in its socio-cultural matrix. The argument is that critical realism is effective for developing a comprehensive account of theatrical performance because it has the capacity to reveal truths about the structure of social reality (that correspond to those articulated by critical realism). In the second part of the review, employing the methods of conceptual analysis, I propose that Nellhaus's thesis of 'ontological doubling' (which claims that performance doubles human agency) is undermined by certain epistemological presuppositions regarding the ontology of fictional characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the book "Questioning the Veil: Open Lettersto Muslim Women," by Marnia Lazreg.

The article reviews the book "Toward an Emancipatory Psychoanalysis: Brandchaft's Subjective Vision," by Bernard Brandchaft, Shelley Doctors, and Dorienne Sorter.

The article analyzes author Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat," comparing the representation of the narrator and cat. It focuses on the prosopopoeia, or personification, of the cat by stating that it becomes more human through the story while the narrator becomes more animalistic. The narrator's agency, or ability to act and make choices independently, is also discussed. Other topics include animal-human relationships, the symbolism of corpses, and pet ownership.

The article reviews the books "Shakespeare and the Law," edited by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt and "Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England," Paul Raffield.

The article reviews the book "Anti-Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Resistance," edited by George J. Sefa Dei and Arlo Kempf.

The article reviews the book "The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy," edited by Luis L. M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod.

The article reviews the book "Power in Colonial Africa: Conflict and Discourse in Lesotho, 1870-1960," by Elizabeth A. Eldredge.

The article reviews the book "The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony," by Molefi Kete Asante.

The article reviews the book "Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities," by Kamari Maxine Clarke.