Intellectual History of the Modern Age
Terrence Malick is one of American cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers. His films—from Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) to The Thin Red Line (1998), The Tree of Life (2011), and, most recently, A Hidden Life (2019)—have been heralded for their artistry and lauded for their beauty, but what really sets them apart is their ideas. Terrence Malick and the Examined Life is the most comprehensive account to date of this unparalleled filmmaker’s intellectual and artistic development.
Utilizing newly available archival sources to offer original interpretations of his canonical films, Martin Woessner illuminates Malick’s early education in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford as well as his cinematic apprenticeship at the American Film Institute to show how a young student searching for personal meaning became a famous director of Hollywood films. Woessner’s book presents a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of the many texts, thinkers, and traditions that made this transformation possible—from the novels of Hamlin Garland, James Jones, and Walker Percy to the philosophies of Stanley Cavell, Martin Heidegger, and Søren Kierkegaard to road movies, Hollywood Westerns, and the comedies of Jean Renoir. Situating Malick’s filmmaking within recent intellectual and cultural history, Woessner highlights its lasting contributions to both American cinema and the life of the mind.
Terrence Malick and the Examined Life suggests it is time for philosophy to be viewed not merely as an academic subject, overseen by experts, but also as a way of life, open to each and every moviegoer.
Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.
Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault’s childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault’s oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault’s childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family’s deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education.
Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault’s later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher’s life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.
The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in eighteenth-century thought.
Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity into novel "racial" groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a vitriolic denunciation of slavery and inhumane treatment that was grounded in the nascent philosophy of human rights. Vartija contends that the tension between Enlightenment ideas of race and equality can best be explained by these thinkers' attempt to provide a naturalistic account of humanity, including both our physical and moral attributes. Enlightenment racial classification fits into the novel inclusion of humanity in histories of nature, while the search for the origins of morality in social experience alone lent equality a normative authority it had not previously possessed.
Eschewing straightforward approbation or blame of the Enlightenment, The Color of Equality demonstrates that our present-day thinking about human physical and cultural diversity continues to be deeply informed by an eighteenth-century European intellectual revolution with global ramifications.
The Maternalists is a study of the hitherto unexplored significance of utopian visions of the state as a maternal entity in mid-twentieth century Britain. Demonstrating the affinities between welfarism, maternalism, and psychoanalysis, Shaul Bar-Haim suggests a new reading of the British welfare state as a political project.
After the First World War, British doctors, social thinkers, educators, and policy makers became increasingly interested in the contemporary turn being made in psychoanalytic theory toward the role of motherhood in child development. These public figures used new notions of the "maternal" to criticize modern European culture, and especially its patriarchal domestic structure. This strand of thought was pioneered by figures who were well placed to disseminate their ideas into the higher echelons of British culture, education, and medical care. Figures such as the anthropologists Bronislaw Malinowski and Geza Róheim, and the psychiatrist Ian Suttie—to mention only a few of the "maternalists" discussed in the book—used psychoanalytic vocabulary to promote both imagined perceptions of motherhood and their idea of the "real" essence of the "maternal." In the 1930s, as European fascism took hold, the "maternal" became a cultural discourse of both collective social anxieties and fantasies, as well as a central concept in many strands of radical, and even utopian, political thinking. During the Second World War, and even more so in the postwar era, psychoanalysts such as D. W. Winnicott and Michael Balint responded to the horrors of the war by drawing on interwar maternalistic thought, making a demand to "maternalize" British society, and providing postwar Britain with a new political idiom for defining the welfare state as a project of collective care.
Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political theorists of the twentieth century to wrestle with the role of violence in public life. Yet remarkably, despite the fact that it was perhaps the most pressing issue of her era, this theme in her work has rarely been explored. In Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Caroline Ashcroft deepens our understanding of Arendt's conception of the role of violence, offering a critical reading of her work and using it as a provocation to think about how we might engage with contemporary ideas.
Arendt has generally been thought to exclude acts of violence from "the political," based on her supposed idealization of ancient democratic politics. Ashcroft argues that Arendt has been widely misunderstood by both critics and advocates on this. By examining Arendt's thought on violence in key examples of political practice such as modern Jewish politics, the politics of Greece and Rome, and the French and American revolutions, Ashcroft reveals a more pragmatic notion of the place of violence in the political. She argues that what Arendt opposes in political violence is the use of force to determine politics, an idea central to modern sovereignty. What Arendt criticizes is not violence as such, but the misuse of violence and misunderstandings of politics which exclude participatory power altogether.
This work also engages with a wider set of concerns in political theory by obliging us to rethink the relations between violence and politics. Arendt's work offers a way to bridge the gulf between sovereign or realist politics and nonhierarchical, nonviolent participatory politics, and thus offers valuable resources for contemporary political theory.
Within the Western tradition, it was the philosophers Henri Bergson and Max Scheler who laid out and explored the nonrational power of "intuition" at work in human beings that plays a key role in orienting their thinking and action within the world. As author Adriana Alfaro Altamirano notes, Bergon's and Scheler's philosophical explorations, which paralleled similar developments by other modernist writers, artists, and political actors of the early twentieth century, can yield fruitful insights into the ideas and passions that animate politics in our own time.
The Belief in Intuition shows that intuition (as Bergson and Scheler understood it) leads, first and foremost, to a conception of freedom that is especially suited for dealing with hierarchy, uncertainty, and alterity. Such a conception of freedom is grounded in a sense of individuality that remains true to its "inner multiplicity," thus providing a distinct contrast to and critique of the liberal notion of the self.
Focusing on the complex inner lives that drive human action, as Bergson and Scheler did, leads us to appreciate the moral and empirical limits of liberal devices that mean to regulate our actions "from the outside." Such devices, like the law, may not only carry pernicious effects for freedom but, more troublingly, oftentimes "erase their traces," concealing the very ways in which they are detrimental to a richer experience of subjectivity.
According to Alfaro Altamirano, Bergson's and Scheler's conception of intuition and personal authority puts contemporary discussions about populism in a different light: It shows that liberalism would only at its own peril deny the anthropological, moral, and political importance of the bearers of charismatic authority. Personal authority thus understood relies on a dense, but elusive, notion of personality, for which personal authority is not only consistent with freedom, but even contributes to it in decisive ways.
For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation.
In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." Yet the Jewish example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival.
The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion.
In 1817, in a region of the eastern coast of British India then known as Cuttack, a group of Paiks, the area's landed militia, began agitating against the East India Company's government, burning down government buildings and looting the treasury. While the attacks were initially understood as an attempt to return the territory's native ruler to power, investigations following the rebellion's suppression traced the cause back to the introduction of a model of revenue governance unsuited to local conditions. Elsewhere in British India, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, interregional debates over revenue settlement models and property disputes in villages revealed an array of practices of governance that negotiated with the problem of their applicability to local conditions. And at the same time in Britain, the dominant Ricardian conception of political economy was being challenged by thinkers like Richard Jones and William Whewell, who sought to make political economy an inductive science, capable of analyzing the real world.
Through analyses of these three interrelated moments in British imperial history, Upal Chakrabarti's Assembling the Local engages with articulations of the "local" on multiple theoretical and empirical fronts, weaving them into a complex reflection on the problem of difference and a critical commentary on connections between political economy, agrarian property, and governance. Chakrabarti argues that the "local" should be reconceptualized as an abstract machine, central to the construction of the universal, namely, the establishment of political economy as a form of governance in nineteenth-century British India.
An intellectual biography of the renowned and influential observer of the "era of tyrannies"
Élie Halévy (1870-1937) was one of the most respected and influential intellectuals of the French Third Republic. In this densely contextualized biography, K. Steven Vincent describes how Halévy, best remembered as the historian of British Utilitarianism and nineteenth-century English history, was also a persistent, acute, and increasingly anxious observer of society in a period defined by industrialization and imperialism and by what Halévy famously called the "era of tyrannies."
Vincent distinguishes three broad phases in the development of Halévy's thought. In the first, Halévy brought his version of neo-Kantianism to debates with sociologists and philosophers and to his study of English Utilitarianism. He forged ties with Xavier Léon, Léon Brunschvicg, and Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier), life-long intellectual interlocutors. Together they founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, a continuing venue for Halévy's reflections. The Dreyfus Affair, Vincent argues, caused Halévy to shift his focus from philosophy to history and from metaphysics to politics. He became a philosopher-historian, less interested in abstract neo-Kantianism and more in real-world action, less given to rarified debates over truth and more to investigation of how theories and their applications were situated within broader political, economic, and cultural movements. World War I and its destabilizing effects provoked the third phase, Vincent explains. As he watched reason recede before rabid nationalism and a pox of political enthusiasms, Halévy sounded the alarm about liberal democracy's vulnerabilities.
Vincent situates Halévy on the unsteady and narrowing middle ground between state socialism and fascism, showing how he defended liberalism while, at the same time, appreciating socialists' analyses of capitalism's negative impact and their calls for reform and greater economic equality. Through his analysis of Halévy's life and works, Vincent illuminates the complexity of the Third Republic's philosophical, historical, and political thought and concludes with an incisive summary of the distinctive nature of French liberalism.
A close look at post-1968 French thinkers Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist
In The Anthropological Turn, Jacob Collins traces the development of what he calls a tradition of "political anthropology" in France over the course of the 1970s. After the social revolution of the 1960s brought new attention to identities and groups that had previously been marginal in French society, the country entered a period of stagnation: the economy slowed, the political system deadlocked, and the ideologies of communism and Catholicism lost their appeal. In this time of political, cultural, and economic indeterminacy, political anthropology, as Collins defines it, offered social theorists grand narratives that could give greater definition to "the social" by anchoring its laws and histories in the deep and sometimes archaic past.
Political anthropologists sought to answer the most basic of questions: what is politics and what constitutes a political community? Collins focuses on four influential, yet typically overlooked, French thinkers—Régis Debray, Emmanuel Todd, Marcel Gauchet, and Alain de Benoist —who, from Left to far Right, represent different political leanings in France. Through a close and comprehensive reading of their work, he explores how key issues of religion, identity, citizenship, and the state have been conceptualized and debated across a wide spectrum of opinion in contemporary France.
Collins argues that the stakes have not changed since the 1970s and rival conceptions of the republic continue to vie for dominance. Political and cultural issues of the moment—the burkini, for example—become magnified and take on the character of an anthropological threat. In this respect, he shows how the anthropological turn, as it figures in the work of Debray, Todd, Gauchet, and Benoist, is a useful lens for viewing the political and social controversies that have shaped French history for the last forty years.
An instant is the shortest span in which time can be divided and experienced. In an instant, there is no duration: it is an interruption that happens in the blink of an eye. For the ancient Greeks, kairos, the time in which exceptional, unrepeatable events occurred, was opposed to chronos, measurable, quantitative, and uniform time. In The Moment of Rupture, Humberto Beck argues that during the years of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism in Germany, the notion of the instant migrated from philosophy and aesthetics into politics and became a conceptual framework for the interpretation of collective historical experience that, in turn, transformed the subjective perception of time.
According to Beck, a significant juncture occurred in Germany between 1914 and 1940, when a modern tradition of reflection on the instant—spanning the poetry of Goethe, the historical self-understanding of the French Revolution, the aesthetics of early Romanticism, the philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and the artistic and literary practices of Charles Baudelaire and the avant gardes—interacted with a new experience of historical time based on rupture and abrupt discontinuity. Beck locates in this juncture three German thinkers—Ernst Jünger, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin—who fused the consciousness of war, crisis, catastrophe, and revolution with the literary and philosophical formulations of the instantaneous and the sudden in order to intellectually represent an era marked by the dissolution between the extraordinary and the everyday. The Moment of Rupture demonstrates how Jünger, Bloch, and Benjamin produced a constellation of figures of sudden temporality that contributed to the formation of what Beck calls a distinct "regime of historicity," a mode of experiencing time based on the notion of a discontinuous present.
In Race, Nation, History, Oded Y. Steinberg examines the way a series of nineteenth-century scholars in England and Germany first constructed and then questioned the periodization of history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras, shaping the way we continue to think about the past and present of Western civilization at a fundamental level. Steinberg explores this topic by tracing the deep connections between the idea of epochal periodization and concepts of race and nation that were prevalent at the time—especially the role that Germanic or Teutonic tribes were assumed to play in the unfolding of Western history.
Steinberg shows how English scholars such as Thomas Arnold, Williams Stubbs, and John Richard Green; and German scholars such as Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, Max Müller, and Reinhold Pauli built on the notion of a shared Teutonic kinship to establish a correlation between the division of time and the ascent or descent of races or nations. For example, although they viewed the Germanic tribes' conquest of the Roman Empire in A.D. 476 as a formative event that symbolized the transformation from antiquity to the Middle Ages, they did so by highlighting the injection of a new and dominant ethnoracial character into the decaying empire. But they also rejected the idea that the fifth century A.D. was the most decisive era in historical periodization, advocating instead for a historical continuity that emphasized the significance of the Germanic tribes' influence on the making of the nations of modern Europe. Concluding with character studies of E. A. Freeman, James Bryce, and J. B. Bury, Steinberg demonstrates the ways in which the innovative schemes devised by this community of Victorian historians for the division of historical time relied on the cornerstone of race.
In the late Enlightenment, a new imperative began to inform theories of interpretation: all literary texts should be read in the same way that we read the Bible. However, this assumption concealed a problem—there was no coherent "we" who read the Bible in the same way. In Secularism and Hermeneutics, Yael Almog shows that several prominent thinkers of the era, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, constituted readers as an imaginary "we" around which they could form their theories and practices of interpretation. This conception of interpreters as a universal community, Almog argues, established biblical readers as a coherent collective.
In the first part of the book, Almog focuses on the 1760s through the 1780s and examines these writers' works on biblical Hebrew and their reliance on the conception of the Old Testament as a cultural, rather than religious, asset. She reveals how the detachment of textual hermeneutics from confessional affiliation was stimulated by debates on the integration of Jews in Enlightenment Germany. In order for the political community to cohere, she contends, certain religious practices were restricted to the private sphere while textual interpretation, which previously belonged to religious contexts, became the foundation of the public sphere. As interpretive practices were secularized and taken to be universal, they were meant to overcome religious difference. Turning to literature and the early nineteenth century in the second part of the book, Almog demonstrates the ways in which the new literary genres of realism and lyric poetry disrupted these interpretive reading practices. Literary techniques such as irony and intertextuality disturbed the notion of a stable, universal reader's position and highlighted interpretation as grounded in religious belonging.
Secularism and Hermeneutics reveals the tension between textual exegesis and confessional belonging and challenges the modern presumption that interpretation is indifferent to religious concerns.
The Spatial Reformation offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, between 1350 and 1850, and calls for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range.
The decades following the end of World War II witnessed the establishment of a large and diverse German-American scholarly community studying modern German history. As West Germany's formerly deeply nationalist academic establishment began to reconcile itself with postwar liberalism, American historians played a crucial role, both assisting and learning from their German counterparts' efforts to make sense of the Nazi past—and to reconstruct how German society viewed it.
In History After Hitler, Philipp Stelzel puts this story center stage for the first time, positioning the dialogue between German and American historians as a key part of the intellectual history of the Federal Republic and of Cold War transatlantic relations. Making extensive use of previously inaccessible or unexplored personal papers and institutional files in German and American archives, Stelzel demonstrates that several factors fostered the growth of this transatlantic scholarly community. As a result of both National Socialism and the Cold War, American interest in Germany grew remarkably. In addition, a small but increasingly influential cohort of German émigré historians working in the United States served as transatlantic intermediaries. Finally, the strong appeal of American academia to West German historians of different generations led many of them to form and maintain close ties with their American colleagues.
History After Hitler explores how these historians participated as public intellectuals in debates about how to cope with the Nazi past, believing that the historical awareness of West German citizens would bolster the Federal Republic's democratization. Stelzel also corrects simplistic arguments regarding the supposed "Westernization" of the Federal Republic, emphasizing that American scholars, too, benefited from the transatlantic conversation. History After Hitler makes the case that, together, German and American historians contributed to the development of postwar German culture, intellectual life, and national self-understanding.
Friedrich Nietzsche is often depicted in popular and scholarly discourse as a lonely philosopher dealing with abstract concerns unconnected to the intellectual debates of his time and place. Robert C. Holub counters this narrative, arguing that Nietzsche was very well attuned to the events and issues of his era and responded to them frequently in his writings. Organized around nine important questions circulating in Europe at the time in the realms of politics, society, and science, Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century presents a thorough investigation of Nietzsche's familiarity with contemporary life, his contact with and comments on these various questions, and the sources from which he gathered his knowledge.
Holub begins his analysis with Nietzsche's views on education, nationhood, and the working-class movement, turns to questions of women and women's emancipation, colonialism, and Jews and Judaism, and looks at Nietzsche's dealings with evolutionary biology, cosmological theories, and the new "science" of eugenics. He shows how Nietzsche, although infrequently read during his lifetime, formulated his thought in an ongoing dialogue with the concerns of his contemporaries, and how his philosophy can be conceived as a contribution to the debates taking place in the nineteenth century. Throughout his examination, Holub finds that, against conventional wisdom, Nietzsche was only indirectly in conversation with the modern philosophical tradition from Descartes through German idealism, and that the books and individuals central to his development were more obscure writers, most of whom have long since been forgotten.
This book thus sheds light on Nietzsche's thought as enmeshed in a web of nineteenth-century discourses and offers new insights into his interactive method of engaging with the philosophical universe of his time.
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor.
In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.
How did educated and cultivated men in early modern France and Britain perceive and value their own and women's cognitive capacities, and how did women in their circles challenge those perceptions, if only by revaluing the kinds of intelligence attributed to them? What was thought to distinguish the "manly mind" from the feminine mind? How did awareness of these questions inform various kinds of published and unpublished texts, including the philosophical treatise, the dialogue, the polite essay, and the essay in literary criticism?
The Labor of the Mind plumbs the social and cultural logic of the Enlightenment's trope of the manly mind; offers new readings of the textual representations of it; and examines the ways in which the trope was subverted or at least subtly questioned. With close readings of the writings of well-known and less familiar men and women, including Poullain de la Barre, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Madeleine de Scudéry, David Hume, Antoine-Léonard Thomas, Suzanne Curchod Necker, Denis Diderot, and Louise d'Epinay, and tracing their social networks and friendships, Anthony J. La Vopa explores the problematic opposition between mental labor as concentrated and sustained work, a labor of abstraction and judgment for which only men had the strength, and an aesthetic of effortless and tasteful play in polite conversation in which women were thought to excel. Covering nearly a century and a half of cultural and intellectual life from France to England and Scotland and then back again, La Vopa locates, beneath the tenacity of assumed natural differences, a lexicon imbued with ambivalence, ambiguity, and argument. The Labor of the Mind reveals the legacy for modernity of a fraught gendering of intellectual labor.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, two intertwined changes began to shape the direction of German society. The baptism of the German film industry took place amid post-World War I conditions of political and social breakdown, and the cultural vacuum left by collapsing institutions was partially filled by moving images. At the same time, the emerging human sciences—psychiatry, neurology, sexology, eugenics, industrial psychology, and psychoanalysis—began to play an increasingly significant role in setting the terms for the way Germany analyzed itself and the problems it had inherited from its authoritarian past, the modernizing process, and war. Moreover, in advancing their professional and social goals, these sciences became heavily reliant on motion pictures.
Situated at the intersection of film studies, the history of science and medicine, and the history of modern Germany, Homo Cinematicus connects the rise of cinema as a social institution to an inquiry into the history of knowledge production in the human sciences. Taking its title from a term coined in 1919 by commentator Wilhelm Stapel to identify a new social type that had been created by the emergence of cinema, Killen's book explores how a new class of experts in these new disciplines converged on the figure of the "homo cinematicus" and made him central to many of that era's major narratives and social policy initiatives.
Killen traces film's use by the human sciences as a tool for producing, communicating, and popularizing new kinds of knowledge, as well as the ways that this alliance was challenged by popular films that interrogated the truth claims of both modern science and scientific cinema. In doing so, Homo Cinematicus endeavors to move beyond the divide between scientific and popular film, examining their historical coexistence and coevolution.
