Brilliant essays on the female nude, on images not just of chess games but of chess queens in recent film and television ... full of marvelous and disturbing ideas ... Summing Up: Recommended.

CHOICE

<p>This is a very important, relevant book for today’s world. Bronfen is one of the very rare scholars who, in accessible prose, offers in-depth analyses of the interactions between “high” art and “popular” visual culture, focusing on the socio-political relevance of that crossover. Analysing literature, cinema, television series and other works of popular fiction, from present to past and back, Bronfen is a brilliant “image-thinker”, and so makes a strong case for the urgent necessity of the Humanities in today’s world.</p>

Mieke Bal, Independent scholar affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and video artist

The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.
Les mer
A major cultural critic rethinks Creativity & the Cultural Imaginary

Introduction. Crossmappings. Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural Imaginary

Part I. Travelling Image Formulas

Chapter 1. Facing Defacement. Degas' Portraits of Women
Chapter 2. Naked Touch. Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude
Chapter 3. Leaving an Imprint. Francesca Woodman's Photographic tableaux vivants
Chapter 4. Pop Cinema. Hollywood's Critical Engagement with America's Culture of Consumption
Chapter 5. Hitler Goes Pop. Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment
Chapter 6. Simulations of the Real. Paul McCarthy's Performance Disasters
Chapter 7. Wagner's Isolde in Hollywood
Chapter 8. Shakespeare's Wire
Chapter 9. Queen of Chess. On Serial Reading


Part II: Gendering the Uncanny, Imaging Death

Chapter 10. The Horror of the Familiar. Freud's Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny
Chapter 11. Gendering Curiosity. The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle
Chapter 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical Performance
Chapter 13. Eva Hesse's Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double
Chapter 14. Wounds of Wonder. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki
Chapter 15. The Fragility of the Quotidien. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Work with Death
Chapter 16. Picasso's War Women
Chapter 17. Contending with the Father. Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation
Notes
Index

Les mer
A major cultural critic rethinks Creativity & the Cultural Imaginary.
Engages in an interdisciplinary study of literature, cinema, and visual culture
We stand at several crossroads at the moment in relation to the visual arts and cultures, historical and contemporary, and to theories and methods of analysis. The series New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts, edited by Griselda Pollock, confronts de rigueur cultural research with critical and crucial questions regarding its relevance in the contemporary world, such as how we think about visual art, the status of art history in the institution, and whether visual culture is taking its place. Working with transdisciplinary research, the series opens up new fields of collaboration in the visual cultures through encounters between ways of thinking, doing and making in the arts and humanities, connecting praxis and theory in new and innovative ways. Exploring art, history, culture, film and photography, the series seeks new knowledge by facilitating encounters between and across these different ways of doing, making and thinking about visual culture, and its place in contemporary life.
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781788311076
Publisert
2018-05-22
Utgiver
Vendor
I.B. Tauris
Vekt
1046 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
432

Forfatter
Preface by

Biografisk notat

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and her books in psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic; The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents; Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film; Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, and Mad Men, Death and the American Dream.