Transfigurations

Transfigurations

Author: Asbjørn Grønstad

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 908964010X

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In many senses, viewers have cut their teeth on the violence in American cinema: from Anthony Perkins slashing Janet Leigh in the most infamous of shower scenes; to the 1970s masterpieces of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Francis Ford Coppola; to our present-day undertakings in imagining global annihilations through terrorism, war, and alien grudges. Transfigurations brings our cultural obsession with film violence into a renewed dialogue with contemporary theory. Grønstad argues that the use of violence in Hollywood films should be understood semiotically rather than viewed realistically; Tranfigurations thus alters both our methodology of reading violence in films and the meanings we assign to them, depicting violence not as a self-contained incident, but as a convoluted network of our own cultural ideologies and beliefs.


Crimes Unspoken

Crimes Unspoken

Author: Miriam Gebhardt

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-12-20

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1509511237

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The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies – American, French and British – as by the members of the Red Army. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.


The National Frame

The National Frame

Author: Banu Karaca

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 0823290220

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Based on long-term ethnographic research in the art worlds of Istanbul and Berlin, The National Frame rethinks the politics of art by focusing on the role of art in state governance. It argues that artistic practices, arts patronage and sponsorship, collecting and curating art, and the modalities of censorship continue to be refracted through the conceptual lens of the nation-state, despite the globalization of the arts. By examining discussions of the civilizing function of art in Turkey and Germany and particularly moments in which art is seen to cede this function, The National Frame reveals the histories of violence on which the production, circulation, and, very understanding of art are predicated. Karaca examines this darker side of art in two cities in which art and its institutions have been intertwined with symbolic and material dispossession. The particularities of German and Turkish contexts, both marked by attempts to claim modern nationhood through the arts; illuminate how art is staked to memory and erasure, resistance and restoration; and why art has been at once vital and unwieldy for national projects. As art continues to be called upon to engage the past and imagine different futures, The National Frame explores how to reclaim art’s emancipatory potential.


Sex in Public

Sex in Public

Author: Eric Naiman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0691656975

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Sex in Public examines the ideological poetics and the rhetoric of power in the Soviet Union during the 1920s, a period of anxiety over the historical legitimacy of Soviet ideology and Bolshevik power. Drawing on a wide range of soruces—Party Congress transcripts, the classics of early Soviet literature, sex education pamphlets, the cinema, crime reports, and early Soviet ventures into popular science—the author seeks to explain the period's preoccupation with crime, disease, and, especially, sex. Using strategies of reading developed by literary scholars, he devotes special care to exploring the role of narrative in authoritative political texts. The book breaks new ground in its attention to the ideological importance of the female body during this important formative stage of Bolshevik rule. Sex in Public provides a fundamentally new history of the New Economic Policy and offers important revisionist readings of many of the fundamental cultural products of the early Soviet period. Perhaps most important, it serves as a model for the sort of interdisciplinary work that is possible when historians take literary and ideology theory seriously and when ideology theorists seek to conform to the standards of documentary rigor traditionally demanded by historians. It thus becomes a study that can be read as both positivistic and postmodern. Eric Naiman is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally published in 1997. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Bibliography of Slavic Literature

Bibliography of Slavic Literature

Author: Dasha C̆ulić Nisula

Publisher: Scarecrow Area Bibliographies

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13:

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Nisula covers materials published in the United States and abroad since 1989 covering Slavic literature from the medieval period to the end of the twentieth century. The three main sections are meticulously structured to cover all the dimensions of geographical space, literary genres, topics, authors and time. The first section examines general works on Slavic literature--namely Slavic bibliographies, journals, and library holdings. The second one frames the bibliographic sources within the Slavic geographic perimeter: East, Central and South Europe, while the final section considers regional and national literature. One of the richest European cultures reveals itself in the pages of this book and all those who want to understand the multiple aspects of Slavic literature can find in this an essential guide.


A Companion to Michael Haneke

A Companion to Michael Haneke

Author: Roy Grundmann

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-02-04

Total Pages: 658

ISBN-13: 1444320610

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A Companion to Michael Haneke With a new preface addressing the Academy award-winning film, Amour, this new-in-paper edition has established itself as the definitive collection on Michael Haneke—from his early work in television and theater, through his prodigious cinematic output, to his 2009 triumph at Cannes. A Companion to Michael Haneke brings together essays by leading film scholars, as well as interviews with the director himself, to probe the provocative and controversial themes that have formed the nucleus of Haneke’s work—intergenerational dysfunction and social alienation, colonialism and citizenship, surveillance and pornography, mass culture and media violence. The volume also offers a critical examination of the auteur’s oeuvre, including Three Paths to the Lake, Lemmings, Benny’s Video, The Piano Teacher, Caché, Funny Games, and the 2009 Palme d’Or winner, The White Ribbon.


The Aesthetics of Loss

The Aesthetics of Loss

Author: Claudia Siebrecht

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2013-09-19

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0191630675

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The Aesthetics of Loss is a cultural history of German women's art of the First World War that locates the artists' rich visual testimony in the context of the civilian experience of war and wartime loss. Drawing on a fascinating body of visual sources produced throughout the war years, Claudia Siebrecht examines the thematic evolution of women's art from expressions of support for the war effort to more nuanced and ambivalent testimonies of loss and grief. Many of the images are stark woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs of great iconographical power that acted as narrative tools to deal with the novel, unsettling, and often traumatic experience of war. German female artists developed a unique aesthetic response to the conflict that both expressed emotional distress and allowed them to re-imagine the place of mourning women in wartime society. Historical codes of wartime behaviour and traditional rites of public mourning led female artists to redefine cultural practices of bereavement, question existing notions of heroic death and proud bereavement through art, and to place grief at the centre of women's war experiences. As a cultural, aesthetic, and thematic point of reference, German women's art of the First World War has had a fundamental influence on the European memory and understanding of modern war.