Essays and examples reveal the esthetic and sexual aspects of the cutting edge of fashion photography and discuss the work of Erwin Blumenfeld and Karl Lagerfeld.
Essays and examples reveal the esthetic and sexual aspects of the cutting edge of fashion photography and discuss the work of Erwin Blumenfeld and Karl Lagerfeld.
While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that 'the infinite relation' between seeing and saying plays in their work. Shapiro reveals the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault's concern with the visual.
The book is an authoritative and up-to-date collection of original essays on one of the greatest of all English poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It covers a wide range of topics, exploring Shelley's life and work from various angles.
William Faulkner occupied a unique position as a modern writer. Although famous for his modernist novels and their notorious difficulty, he also wrote extensively for the "culture industry," and the works he produced for it—including short stories, adaptations, and screenplays—bore many of the hallmarks of consumer art. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter influenced him in a number of ways, many of them negative, while the films turned out by the "dream factories" in which he labored sporadically inspired both his interest and his contempt. Faulkner also disparaged the popular magazines—though he frequently sold short stories to them. To what extent was Faulkner's deeply ambivalent relationship to—and involvement with—American popular culture reflected in his modernist or "art" fiction? Peter Lurie finds convincing evidence that Faulkner was keenly aware of commercial culture and adapted its formulae, strategies, and in particular, its visual techniques into the language of his novels of the 1930s. Lurie contends that Faulkner's modernism can be best understood in light of his reaction to the popular culture of his day. Using Theodor Adorno's theory about modern cultural production as a framework, Lurie's close readings of Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!, and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem uncover the cultural history that surrounded and influenced the development of Faulkner's art. Lurie is particularly interested in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and especially the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in Augustof stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism.
The fourteen contributors to Sites of Vision explore the hypothesis that the nature of visual perception about which philosophers talk must be explicitly recognized as a discursive construction, indeed a historical construction, in philosophical discourse. In recent years scholars from many disciplines have become interested in the "construction" of the human senses--in how the human environment shapes both how and what we perceive. Taking a very different approach to the question of construction, Sites of Vision turns to language and explores the ways in which the rhetoric of philosophy has formed the nature of vision and how, in turn, the rhetoric of vision has helped to shape philosophical thought. The central role of vision in relation to philosophy is evident in the vocabulary of the discipline--in words such as "speculation," "observation," "insight," and "reflection"; in metaphors such as "mirroring," "perspective," and "point of view"; and in methodological concepts such as "reflective detachment" and "representation." Because the history of vision is so pervasively reflected in the history of philosophy, it is possible for both vision and thought to achieve a greater awareness of their genealogy through the history of philosophy. The fourteen contributors to Sites of Vision explore the hypothesis that the nature of visual perception about which philosophers talk must be explicitly recognized as a discursive construction, indeed a historical construction, in philosophical discourse.
This book explores “Making of” sites as a genre of cultural artefact. Moving beyond “making-of” documentaries, the book analyses novels, drama, film, museum exhibitions and popular studies that re-present the making of culturally loaded film adaptations. It argues that the “Making of” genre operates on an adaptive spectrum, orienting towards and enacting the adaptation of films and their making. The book examines the behaviours that characterise “Making of” sites across visual media; it explores the cultural work done by these sites, why recognition of “Making of” sites as adaptations matters, and why our conception of adaptation matters. Part one focuses on the adaptive domain presented by the “Making of” John Ford’s The Quiet Man. Part two attends to “Making of” Gone with the Wind sites, and concludes with “Making of” The Lord of the Rings texts as the acme of the cultural risks and investments charted in earlier chapters.