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Title:  The Infantile Grotesque: Pathology, Sexuality and a Theory of Religion Author: Francis Sanzaro Series: Emergence Imprint: Noesis Press (The Davies Group, Publishers) 162 pp. soft cover USD 24.00 ISBN 978-1934542491 2016 Why are we so conflicted about childbirth? Simultaneously thought to be natural, unnatural, pornographic, obscene and beautiful, our attitudes about birth harbor our deepest convictions about life, creativity and vitality. It is fair to say, according to Sanzaro, that birth is in a state of crisis. By taking a multi-disciplinary approach, grounded in psycho-analysis, philosophy, film theory, visual art, etc., and combining current events with pop-culture analyses, while also utilizing new research from the fields of medicine, trauma and sexuality, the author is able to argue that, as it is repressed, banned and censored today, childbirth imagery should be classified as a unique type of image—the grotesque. The Infantile Grotesque, therefore, is a critique of culture but begins with a single phenomenon—childbirth. The Infantile Grotesque not only reframes the debate about how birth is, and isn’t viewed, but provides a diagnostic through which to view the vitality of culture. It will be of interest not only to academics, but also anyone interested in pop-culture, media studies, and/or obtaining a deeper understanding of how a species could turn its back on its own process of reproduction. Contents Preface  The Live Event Grotesque                The True Voice? Chapter 1  Leitmotifs, Tropes and Clichés: The Lisa; The Bump; Baby X and Going Live; Fined for Screaming Chapter 2  Aggressive Sensation: Nothing but Shadows; Body, Degradation and Obscenity; The Reverse Crucible; Dirt; A Moral Aesthetic Chapter 3  The Detail: Trauma and Muggings; The Close-Up; The Pornographic Detail; Striptease Anatomy Chapter 4  Not Through the Birth Canal – Religion: Pain and Emptiness; The Grotesque Posture; The Dammerschlaf; Gruffalo Buffalo;        Ungravid Women; Hiding the Erotic Chapter 5  Semen and Ash: The Death Drive; Decay Fantasies – The Sounds of Civilization; Mass Media Trauma;Progress Trap Chapter 6  The Four-Hour Erection: The “Solution”; Porn Chic; Demanding Unending Caresses; The Four-Hour Erection; Doppelgangers of the Earth Chapter 7  Go Home, Socrates: Brodmann’s 17; Fantasy Overcomes Socrates Chapter 8  The Vagina and the Demon: PTSD Chapter 9  Life for Sale?—Religion: The Convalescent; Does it Have Value?; A Parable Chapter 10   Becoming a Lake or a Sea?: Sensate Imagination; Poeticized Life Notes Index “The Topographical Imagination of Jameson, Baudrillard, and Foucault is indeed, as Michael James Rizza argues, a collection of several tapestries:  a study of three of the most important theorists of the postmodern period, whose individual trajectories are traced over the course of their careers; an exploration of the subject as it evolves from an original Enlightenment model; a consideration of the various organizing figures—system of levels, double-spiral, dual caesura—by which today’s projected worlds are imagined. In the end, readers are provided with an intellectual history that is as wide-ranging—from Spinoza and Kant to Debord and Lefebvre—as it is Incisive . . . the theoretical is always informed by a command of literature that is breathtaking in its scope—from Cervantes to Milosz to Borges to Pynchon . . . .  Integrating all of this into a seamless whole is not the easiest of tasks, and it is to the book’s great credit that it does so and in such a way as to join clarity with acuity beautifully.”  —Stacey Olster  Professor of English, Stony Brook University      The Author Francis Sanzaro received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. His most recent publications include The Boulder: A Philosophy for Bouldering and The Useless Society: Nature, Humanity and Culture in the Age of Automation (forthcoming in 2016). His articles and fiction have appeared in Happy Hipocrite, Greyrock Review, Continental Philosophy Review, Counter Culture, Sierra Nevada Review, Rock and Ice Magazine, U.K. Climbing, The Baltimore Post Examiner, and Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, among many others. Currently, he is working on a 21st century Stoic-inspired manual on the art of living.