Strains of Utopia
Strains of Utopia

Author: Caryl Flinn

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1992-06-15

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1400820650

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.

Strains of Utopia
Strains of Utopia

Author: Caryl Flinn

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 9780691006192

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.

Black Utopia
Black Utopia

Author: Alex Zamalin

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-08-20

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 0231547250

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Within the history of African American struggle against racist oppression that often verges on dystopia, a hidden tradition has depicted a transfigured world. Daring to speculate on a future beyond white supremacy, black utopian artists and thinkers offer powerful visions of ways of being that are built on radical concepts of justice and freedom. They imagine a new black citizen who would inhabit a world that soars above all existing notions of the possible. In Black Utopia, Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of social transformation and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures associated with racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture. Black Utopia spans black nationalist visions of an ideal Africa, the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sun Ra’s cosmic mythology of alien abduction. Zamalin casts Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler as political theorists and reflects on the antiutopian challenges of George S. Schuyler and Richard Wright. Their thought proves that utopianism, rather than being politically immature or dangerous, can invigorate political imagination. Both an inspiring intellectual history and a critique of present power relations, this book suggests that, with democracy under siege across the globe, the black utopian tradition may be our best hope for combating injustice.

The Utopia Reader, Second Edition
The Utopia Reader, Second Edition

Author: Gregory Claeys

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2017-02-14

Total Pages: 561

ISBN-13: 147986465X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Utopia Reader compiles primary texts from a variety of authors and movements in the history of theorizing utopias. Utopianism is defined as the various ways of imagining, creating, or analyzing the ways and means of creating an ideal or alternative society. Prominent writers and scholars across history have long explored how or why to envision different ways of life. The volume includes texts from classical Greek literature, the Old Testament, and Plato’s Republic, to Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and beyond. By balancing well-known and obscure examples, the text provides a comprehensive and definitive collection of the various ways Utopias have been conceived throughout history and how Utopian ideals have served as criticisms of existing sociocultural conditions. This new edition includes many historically well-known works, little known but influential texts, and contemporary writings, providing an even more expansive coverage of the varieties of approaches and responses to the concept of utopia in the past, present, and even the future. In particular, the volume now includes feminist writings and work by authors of color, and contends with current concerns, such as the exploration of the ecological ideals of Utopia. Furthermore, Claeys and Sargent highlight twenty-first century trends and popular narrative explorations of Utopias through the genres of young adult dystopias, survivalist dystopias, and non-print utopias. Covering a range of original theories of utopianism and revealing the nuances and concerns of writers across history as they attempt to envision different, ideal societies, The Utopia Reader is an essential resource for anyone who envisions a better future.

Music in Film
Music in Film

Author: Pauline Reay

Publisher: Wallflower Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9781903364659

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Music in Film: Soundtracks and Synergy discusses a broad range of films - from classical Hollywood through to American independents and European art films - and offers a brief history of the development of music in film from the silent era to the present day. In particular, this book explores how music operates as a narrative device, and also emotionally and culturally. By focusing on the increasing synergy between film and music texts, it includes an extended case study of Magnolia as a film script which developed from a pop song. Emphasis is also placed on the divide between the `high culture' of the orchestral score and the `low culture' of the pop song.

Post-Theory
Post-Theory

Author: David Bordwell

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2012-11

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 0299149439

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the 1970s, the academic study of film has been dominated by Structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noel Carroll have opened the floor to other voices challenging the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Addressing topics as diverse as film scores, national film industries, and audience response. Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film.

Trilogies as Cultural Analysis
Trilogies as Cultural Analysis

Author: Gregory Stephens

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-10-12

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1527519112

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a “big picture” view of three universal themes, as seen in literary representations: sea-crossing tales, human-animal relations, and (late) father-son relationships. Seen in triptych, these writings demonstrate how passing between worlds and across cultures has become the normative human condition. Authors analyzed within a hemispheric and post-national frame include works by Ernest Hemingway, J.M. Coetzee’s late Jesus novels, and Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican. Fusing literary criticism, communication studies, and literary nonfiction within a writing studies framework, Trilogies argues for the inclusion in our writing of personal, institutional, and disciplinary perspectives. The book invites readers to re-imagine writing and communication styles. How can we envision and communicate the representations of between-world experiences that are all around us? What kinds of writing and communication styles can travel beyond our “bubbles,” engage General Education students, and gain a hearing in the public sphere?

Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space
Topos in Utopia: A peregrination to early modern utopianism’s space

Author: Sotirios Triantafyllos

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1648892868

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Topos in Utopia' examines early modern literary utopias' and intentional communities' social and cultural conception of space. Starting from Thomas More's seminal work, published in 1516, and covering a period of three centuries until the emergence of Enlightenment's euchronia, this work provides a thorough yet concise examination of the way space was imagined and utilised in the early modern visions of a better society. Dealing with an aspect usually ignored by the scholars of early modern utopianism, this book asks us to consider if utopias' imaginary lands are based not only on abstract ideas but also on concrete spaces. Shedding new light on a period where reformation zeal, humanism's optimism, colonialism's greed and a proto-scientific discourse were combined to produce a series of alternative social and political paradigms, this work transports us from the shores of America to the search for the Terra Australis Incognita and the desire to find a new and better world for us.

Utopia: Social Theory and the Future
Utopia: Social Theory and the Future

Author: Keith Tester

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-02-17

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1317002970

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the light of globalization's failure provide the universal panacea expected by some of its more enthusiastic proponents, and the current status of neo-liberalism in Europe, a search has begun for alternative visions of the future; alternatives to the free market and to rampant capitalism. Indeed, although these alternatives may not be conceived of in terms of being a 'perfect order', there does appear to be a trend towards 'utopian thinking', as people - including scholars and intellectuals - search for inspiration and visions of better futures. If, as this search continues, it transpires that politics has little to offer, then what might social theory have to contribute to the imagination of these futures? Does social theory matter at all? What resources can it offer this project of rethinking the future? Without being tied to any single political platform, Utopia: Social Theory and the Future explores some of these questions, offering a timely and sustained attempt to make social theory relevant through explorations of its resources and possibilities for utopian imaginations. It is often claimed that utopian thought has no legitimate place whatsoever in sociological thinking, yet utopianism has remained part and parcel of social theory for centuries. As such, in addition to considering the role of social theory in the imagination of alternative futures, this volume reflects on how social theory may assist us in understanding and appreciating utopia or utopianism as a special topic of interest, a special subject matter, a special analytical focus or a special normative dimension of sociological thinking. Bringing together the latest work from a leading team of social theorists, this volume will be of interest to sociologists, social and political theorists, anthropologists and philosophers.