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
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