by David Wills (Author)
Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyzes and performs certain questions about the body as an artificial construction. The book deals with the mechanical (eg, a mechanical prosthesis like an artificial leg) in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic in order to demonstrate how far a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory and fiction, its scholarship demonstrates the permeability of the frontiers that define academic regions and delimit a scholarship determined to ascertain, to describe and prescribe, to hold in check and dominate as fields of knowledge what are in fact fields of practice, intervention and invention.
Back Jacket
Most critical efforts look not only humble and constrained beside this magnificent book, but also simply dull--dull in the sense that they have not realized (realized in the sense of 'understood' but also in the sense of 'actualized') the implication of the epistemological revolution that is casually referred to as the coming of 'theory.'--Ross Chambers, University of Michigan