In Transmedial Exposure, Erin Graff Zivin analyzes how works of art are adapted, translated, reenacted, or distorted by works in other media. Taking as her conceptual point of departure philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of exposure as that which unsettles the sovereignty of the self and demands ethical responsibility, Graff Zivin investigates experimental works of art across a range of media from the Americas and Europe. She demonstrates that each ostensibly autonomous work, discipline, or sensory experience is constitutively relational, heteronomous, and exposed: philosophy to music, prose to film, performance to documentation, movement to montage, sound to touch. Exposing Latin American literary and cultural studies to continental philosophy, critical theory, Black thought, and media scholarship, Transmedial Exposure foregrounds the far-reaching ethical and political consequences of embodied, sensorial thought while imagining the possibility of a future experimental humanities.

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. She is the author of four books, including The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary, also published by Duke University Press.