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

The influential cultural critic Elisabeth Bronfen sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema, and visual culture. The crossmappings in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its 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 not only from one historical moment to the next, but also from one medium to another. Following Bronfen on these journeys into the cultural imaginary, the reader encounters prominent artists such as Edgar Degas, Francesca Woodman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Wagner, Pablo Picasso and William Shakespeare, alongside Classical Hollywood's film noir and melodrama, and the TV series The Wire and House of Cards.

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Introduction

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

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A major cultural critic rethinks creativity and the cultural imaginary in a lively exploration of literature, cinema and visual culture.
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.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781350297029
Publisert
2022-08-11
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Vekt
980 gr
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Dybde
26 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
432

Forfatter
Forord av

Om bidragsyterne

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English & American Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, USA. She is a specialist in 19th- and 20th-century literature and her books on 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.