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Author: Nancy Bombaci Publisher: Peter Lang ISBN: 9780820478326 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.
Author: Nancy Bombaci Publisher: Peter Lang ISBN: 9780820478326 Category : Foreign Language Study Languages : en Pages : 188
Book Description
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.
Author: Katherine Biers Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816687609 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
In Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a “poetics of the virtual” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity. Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger “virtual turn” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism. Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality.
Author: Gerald Cipriani Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443850225 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 181
Book Description
Vol.3, No.1 of Culture and Dialogue is a Special Issue in many ways. This issue marks the takeover by a new publisher. Because of contractual constraints and practical reasons the decision was made to continue our journey with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, whose great enthusiasm foreshadows a bright future for the journal. Our words of thanks, however, must also go to Airiti Press without which the journal would not have seen the light of day. We are indebted to Airiti Press for having invested into the launch of a new journal, with all the risks entailed, and for their dedicated hard work. We are most grateful for this. The Journal was officially launched in March 2011 and has since produced four issues, all of which focusing on a particular facet of dialogical practice within the field of culture, be it philosophy, art, or politics. Forthcoming issues will offer platforms to explore how dialogue impacts on the shaping of identity, aesthetic meaning, and historical significance. One issue will also be devoted to how dialogue manifests itself in language. This brings us to autumn 2015, after which other pressing themes will, no doubt, be proposed and treated. In whatever case, the thread remains the cultural forms of dialogue; many of us know how critical ignorance about the nature of the dialogue can be, in all fields, at all levels. Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia once wrote that “To be someone is solitude.” Any self-felt genius or world-leading mortal will identify with this. The solitude at stake is that of the one who fails to link with others, or an Other, by denying the possibility to relinquish some of him or herself. In fact, the true someone is never alone; the true someone never leads. This is the message Culture and Dialogue is striving to convey, express, or analyse in its various forms across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Besides, the Journal has always sought, when possible, to preserve a certain spirit of writing in addition to academic rigour and creativity – a spirit that is undeniably fading in the midst of the publish or perish ethos adopted by advanced techno-capitalist systems of education in some parts of the world. Vol.3, No.1 is a Special Issue devoted to the theme of “religion and dialogue.” Cosimo Zene, of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, kindly accepted our invitation to be the Guest Editor, and our words of thanks must first go to him. Cosimo has managed to bring together a range of outstanding essays of which the Journal can only be proud. To various degrees and in different ways all essays discuss dialogue and religion, or show dialogue at work in religious studies. We are most grateful to all the authors who generously contributed to this Special Issue and therefore to the life of the Journal; in alphabetical order, T.H. Barrett, Stephen Chan, Jan-Peter Hartung, Sîan Hawthorne, Catherine Heszer, Tullio Lobetti, Theodore Proferes, and Cosimo Zene.
Author: Robin Blyn Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 0816685894 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 500
Book Description
Since the 1890s, American artists have employed the arts of the freak show to envision radically different ways of being. The result is a rich avant-garde tradition that critiques and challenges capitalism from within. The Freak-garde traces the arts of the freak show from P. T. Barnum to Matthew Barney and demonstrates how a form of mass culture entertainment became the basis for a distinctly American avant-garde tradition. Exploring a wide range of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and artists who have appropriated the arts of the freak show, Robin Blyn exposes the disturbing power of human curiosities and the desires they unleash. Through a series of incisive and often startling readings, Blyn reveals how such figures as Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Nathanael West, and Diane Arbus use these desires to propose alternatives to the autonomous and repressed subject of liberal capitalism. Blyn explains how, rather than grounding revolutionary subjectivities in imaginary realms innocent of capitalism, freak-garde works manufacture new subjectivities by exploiting potentials inherent to capitalism. Defying conventional wisdom, The Freak-garde ultimately argues that postmodernism is not the death of the avant-garde but the inheritor of a vital and generative legacy. In doing so, the book establishes innovative approaches to American avant-garde practices and embodiment and lays the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the disruptive potential of art under capitalism.
Author: Taylor Hagood Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807157279 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 233
Book Description
From the emerging field of disability studies, Taylor Hagood offers the first book-length consideration of impairment in William Faulkner's life and writing. Blending biography, textual analysis, and theory in an experimental style, Hagood explores in both form and content the constructs of normality and their power. Hagood brings to light little-known and rarely discussed ways in which Faulkner's personal and familial background were marked by disability and discusses the ways the writer incorporates disability into his fiction. He reevaluates Faulkner's so-called "idiots"-Benjy Compson, Ike Snopes, and others-as characters whose narratives both satisfy and shock the reader. Hagood also examines the roles that impairment and abnormality play in texts such as the stories "The Leg" and "The Kingdom of God" and the novels A Fable and Flags in the Dust. Highly original readings result, including new understandings of: the centrality of the visually impaired Pap in Sanctuary; the disability-centric social order based on interdependence in Pylon; and the disabled speech of Linda Snopes Kohl in The Mansion. Hagood argues that Faulkner's poetics are deeply invested in disability, both in promoting a disability-inclusive fictional world and in exposing and subverting the devaluation of disabled bodies and minds. Hagood draws on firsthand knowledge of his native of Ripley, Mississippi, the ancestral home of the Faulkners, to offer readers otherwise inaccessible contextual information. Moreover, by framing each section of his study within a different kind of discourse-newspaper style, biography, email, and advertisement-he uses the very structure of the book to underscore the questions of normalcy prevalent in disability studies. This rich and unconventional study offers insight into a Faulkner haunted by experiences of disablement and compelled to narrate them in his own writing.
Author: Daniela Caselli Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351928333 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 477
Book Description
In her compelling reexamination of Djuna Barnes's work, Daniela Caselli raises timely questions about Barnes, biography and feminist criticism, identity and authority, and modernist canon formation. Through close readings of Barnes's manuscripts, correspondence, critically acclaimed and little-known texts, Caselli tackles one of the central unacknowledged issues in Barnes: intertextuality. She shows how throughout Barnes's corpus the repetition of texts, by other authors (from Blake to Middleton) and by Barnes herself, forces us to rethink the relationship between authority and gender and the reasons for her marginal place within modernism. All her texts, linked as they are by correspondences and permutations, wage a war against the common sense of the straight mind. Caselli begins by analyzing how literary criticism has shaped our perceptions of Barnes, showing how the various personae assigned to Barnes are challenged when the right questions are posed: Why is Barnes such a famous author when many of her texts remain unread, even by critics? Why has criticism reduced Barnes's work to biographical speculations? How can Barnes's hybrid, eccentric, and unconventional corpus be read as part of literary modernism when it often seems to sever itself from it? How can an oeuvre reject the labels of feminist and lesbian literature, whilst nevertheless holding at its centre the relationships between language, sexuality, and the real? How can Barnes's work help us to rethink the relation between simplicity and difficulty within literary modernism? Caselli concludes by arguing that Barnes's complex and bewildering work is committed to a high modernist notion of art as a supremely difficult undertaking whilst refusing to conform to standards of modernist acceptability.
Author: Bernd Herzogenrath Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786434473 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
As a director, actor, writer and producer, Tod Browning was one of the most dynamic Hollywood figures during the birth of commercial cinema. Known for his fantastic collaborations with Lon Chaney in numerous silents, and for directing the horror classic Dracula and the still-controversial Freaks, Browning has been called "the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema." Despite not entering the profession until he began acting in his early thirties, he went on to helm more than 60 films in a 25-year career. His work continues to influence directors such as David Lynch, John Waters, and Alejandro Jodorowsky. These essays critically explore such topics as the connection between Browning, Poe and Kant; Browning's cinematic techniques; disability; masochism; sound and suspense; duality; parenthood; narrative and cinematic trickery; George Melford; surrealism; and the occult. A Browning filmography is included.
Author: David Annwn Jones Publisher: University of Wales Press ISBN: 1786833360 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
This is a ground-breaking exploration that runs generally against the critical grain in identifying a burgeoning production of films of fear and horror before the admission of the horror film genre per se. It is a study that reveals and emphasises the formative and innovative power of film, from Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du Diable (1896) to Edgar G. Ulmer’s superbly reflexive The Black Cat (1934). With its focus on twenty-one key films, and referencing other relevant productions, the present study involves an inclusive and sensitive approach. It reveals an awareness of the heterogeneity of horror production with the discussion spanning the period of the invention of movies, the expansion from single-reelers to longer and continuous productions, and the advent of talkies. Stepping beyond the bounds of Anglo-American studios, in its seven chapters the book involves the work of directors from France, Spain, England, Moravia, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Mexico and the USA, to consider and compare films that have not previously received serious attention.
Author: Nancy Bombaci
Author: Nancy Bombaci
Author: Nancy Bombaci
Author: Katherine Biers
Author: Gerald Cipriani
Author: Robin Blyn
Author: Taylor Hagood
Author: Daniela Caselli
Author: Bernd Herzogenrath
Author: Harold Bloom
Author: David Annwn Jones