This chapter turns to memetic experimentation. Meme blends, meta-memes, or cases of ‘memeception’ (or recursivity in memes) all manipulate aspects of form to create new meaning effects. Antimemes, on the other hand, do not alter the form, but change the viewpoint structure and so, the meaning. Some memes, finally, appear to enjoy memetic form for form’s sake, and border on art forms; the so-called Loss meme is our main example here.

This chapter explores the rap debates of philosophical aesthetics, where early academic discourse on rap was at its most active. Rap aestheticians (led by Richard Shusterman) accentuated rap’s nature as an “art form”. The chapter examines the key issues within this debate, including the aesthetic experience of rap, flow (Mtume ya Salaam), the need for public support (and Herbert Grabes’ criticism of this position), and rap’s affinities with the Harlem Renaissance (Marvin Gladney). Rap’s engagement with other cultural practices, like driving and everyday culture, was discussed very early within philosophical aesthetics. Right from the beginning the debate was very international, with many of the authors coming from the Nordic Countries (Esa Sironen, Stefán Snaevarr, Martti Honkanen). It argues that there is still a lot to learn from aesthetic discussions on rap, and these philosophical debates are an interesting historical phenomenon, which rap scholars should know more about.

Although María Irene Fornés is recognized by her peers as one of the great avant-garde innovators of her time, her absence from many critical and mainstream accounts of American playwriting suggests that her experimental techniques were not easily intelligible as part of a movement, even one fabled for the unintelligibility of its creative effects. As a corrective critical gesture, Roy Pérez looks to Art (a short and sparsely documented play from 1986) to understand the role of the avant-garde in Fornés’s larger body of work. Pérez argues that – even as the avant-garde earned a reputation for being fixated on unpragmatic political ideals, aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, or humorless alienation – Fornés wrote plays plays that danced their characters and viewers through spellbinding thought experiments, making lofty questions seem like everyday ruminations, that we might pursue with a sense of play, or at least with authentic feeling.

This chapter situates the emerging antifascism of Diego Rivera and other Mexican artists within the broader contexts of post-revolutionary Mexico, the rise of global fascism, and shifts of the global left. Their antifascism emerged slowly in the 1920s, subordinate to their sharp anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, but moved to the forefront from the mid-30s with the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, and as part of Popular Front strategies across the progressive left. Rivera’s antifascism, shaped by his Communist dissidence during the 1930s, most fully emerged in his US murals. His Portrait of America (1933) denounces US capitalism and imperialism, while addressing the urgency of proletarian unity against fascism. Pan American Unity (1940) reflects Rivera’s disgust with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. It proposes a cultural and political alliance between Latin America and the once-imperial US as the only way to defeat the alliance of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms.

Chapter 10 returns to broader issues of the cultural politics of metaphor, examining the tensions between ethics and aesthetics in illness experience and healing. While the focus on language allows us to mobilize the richness of literature to explore illness experience, in doing so we may inadvertently downplay the material circumstances that determine health disparities and inequities. Against this apparent opposition, I argue that attention to the aesthetics of language and the creative functions of imagination and poeisis can help us understand the mechanisms of suffering and affliction and devise forms of healing that better respond to the needs of individuals within and across diverse cultures and contexts. Every choice of metaphor draws from and points toward a form of life. The critique of metaphors that begins with an appreciation of the qualities they confer on experience, and then moves out into the social world to identify ways that systems and structures are configured, rationalized, and maintained. A critical poetics of illness and healing can contribute to efforts to improve our institutions and achieve greater equity not only by recognizing and respecting difference and diversity but also by engaging with the particulars of each person’s experience.

Humans have historically devised, and continue to devise, various strategies to make their gods present in the mortal realm. The introduction explains how technologies should be understood as one such strategy employed in ancient Greek religion to solve the ‘problem of divine presence’. Key terms including technology, mechanics, art, and technē are explained, and the relationship between these terms is discussed. Various themes important to the book are also introduced: theoretical frameworks to access the agency of technological objects which conditioned ancient religious experience (including a reassessment of Alfred Gell’s theory of art objects); what we should make of apparently conflicting epistemologies in a topic such as this which combines ‘rational’ scientific knowledge and sacred experience; and how concepts of play and the playful were crucial both to religion and to technology in Classical antiquity.

Experiences in mental illness are often highly subjective and out of the ordinary and may be difficult to describe in ordinary language. Through images, metaphors, and other literary tools, literature can facilitate understanding that would not be possible otherwise.

Portrayals of psychiatry provide important feedback for clinicians on how they are perceived by their patients and also for the public on how those with mental illness perceive their position in society. This feedback is often negative, but there are positive examples too. Patients often write about the humanity of the psychiatrist and appreciate their being versed in a range of disciplines, including art or music.

Literature is about weaving a narrative, which is an important part of recovery in psychiatry. Only in literature are we afforded more licence to use our imaginations and less bounded by the limits of reality. In literature, patients and psychiatrists can express many of their thoughts, feelings, and values that could be seen as inappropriate or ‘unprofessional’ in any other context.

Literary works can lay bare those aspects of the cultural and moral context of practice that we may not think about otherwise, including the origins of relevant societal and professional values.

In the 1990s, the challenges of representing the (perhaps, arguably) unrepresentable horror of the Holocaust were hotly debated. The issue still poses crucial theoretical questions that have animated a wide array of both scholarly and aesthetic responses. One might think, for instance, of the very different representational strategies adopted by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah and Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List as marking two ends of the spectrum on how to represent the Holocaust. This chapter articulates the theoretical terrain upon which Holocaust representation unfolds and, in this respect, serves as a theoretical companion to the topic-specific culture chapters that follow.

Even in the worst conditions, Jews needed to hear music, read books, attend lectures, watch actors perform, and participate in a myriad of cultural activities in order to connect to prewar values and memories. This chapter highlights the extraordinary cultural production of Jews in situations from cramped, dangerous ghettos, to the worst possible extremes, concentration and extermination camps. Jews stressed how much cultural activity helped them retain their psychological integrity and resist Nazi attempts to dehumanize them.

The question concerning the adequacy of mimetic representation raised by the Holocaust, of how to best convey the vast suffering, the enormity of extermination, the tragedy of loss, has profoundly shaped the history of the visual arts since 1945. Focusing mainly on painting and sculpture, this chapter argues that Holocaust art largely rejected the turn to abstraction otherwise so characteristic of postwar modernism, in favor of an ongoing engagement with figurative representation. For many artists, this was a way to retain the human dimension of the Holocaust. The shared an underlying ethical and aesthetic commitment to the human figure with its myriad complexities and configurations. At the same time, they sought to avoid falling into the trap of kitsch and sentimentality. This created ineluctable aesthetic dilemmas – to combine beauty and terror – that led to a series of heterogeneous responses, not a “school of art,” but a struggle with aesthetics in the face of catastrophe.

Examines the relationship between clothing and beauty, especially given the link between clothing and fashion and the importance of function. Considers under which circumstances clothing might be thought of as art.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.