America Is Elsewhere

America Is Elsewhere PDF

Author: Erik Dussere

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0199969914

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This study conceives the literary and cinematic category of 'noir' as a way of understanding the defining conflict between authenticity and consumer culture in post-World War II America. It analyses works of fiction and film in order to argue that both contribute to a 'noir tradition' that is initiated around the end of World War II and continues to develop and evolve in the present.

Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Scandinavian Crime Fiction PDF

Author: Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-01-12

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1472529081

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

With its bleak urban environments, psychologically compelling heroes and socially engaged plots, Scandinavian crime writing has captured the imaginations of a global audience in the 21st century. Exploring the genre's key themes, international impact and socio-political contexts, Scandinavian Crime Fiction guides readers through such key texts as Sjöwall and Wahlöö's Novel of a Crime, Gunnar Staalesen's Varg Veum series, Peter Høeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Henning Mankell's Wallander books, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy and TV series such as The Killing. With its focus on the function of crime fiction in both reflecting and shaping the late-modern Scandinavian welfare societies, this book is essential for readers, viewers and fans of contemporary crime writing.

The Art of Identification

The Art of Identification PDF

Author: Rex Ferguson

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-07-12

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0271091371

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a notable acceleration in the development of the techniques used to confirm identity. From fingerprints to photographs to DNA, we have been rapidly amassing novel means of identification, even as personal, individual identity remains a complex chimera. The Art of Identification examines how such processes are entangled within a wider sphere of cultural identity formation. Against the backdrop of an unstable modernity and the rapid rise and expansion of identificatory techniques, this volume makes the case that identity and identification are mutually imbricated and that our best understanding of both concepts and technologies comes through the interdisciplinary analysis of science, bureaucratic infrastructures, and cultural artifacts. With contributions from literary critics, cultural historians, scholars of film and new media, a forensic anthropologist, and a human bioarcheologist, this book reflects upon the relationship between the bureaucratic, scientific, and technologically determined techniques of identification and the cultural contexts of art, literature, and screen media. In doing so, it opens the interpretive possibilities surrounding identification and pushes us to think about it as existing within a range of cultural influences that complicate the precise formulation, meaning, and reception of the concept. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Dorothy Butchard, Patricia E. Chu, Jonathan Finn, Rebecca Gowland, Liv Hausken, Matt Houlbrook, Rob Lederer, Andrew Mangham, Victoria Stewart, and Tim Thompson.

Film Noir

Film Noir PDF

Author: Homer B. Pettey

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-11-11

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0748691081

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Explores the development of film noir as a cultural and artistic phenomenon. This book traces the development of what we know as film noir from the proto-noir elements of Feuillade's silent French crime series and German Expressionism to the genre's mid-twentieth century popularization and influence on contemporary global media. By employing experimental lighting effects, oblique camera angles, distorted compositions, and shifting points-of-view, film noir's style both creates and comments upon a morally adumbrated world, where the alienating effects of the uncanny, the fetishistic, and the surreal dominate. What drew original audiences to film noir is an immediate recognition of this modern social and psychological reality. Much of the appeal of film noir concerns its commentary on social anxieties, its cynical view of political and capitalist corruption, and its all-too-brutal depictions of American modernity. This book examines the changing, often volatile shifts in representations of masculinity and femininity, as well as the genre's complex relationship with Afro-American culture, observable through noir's musical and sonic experiments. Key featuresTraces the history of film noir from its aesthetic antecedents through its mid-century popularization to its influence on contemporary global mediaDiscusses the influence of literary and artistic sources on the development of film noirIncludes extensive bibliographies, filmographies and recommended noir film viewingConcludes with a reflective chapter by Alain Silver and James Ursini on their own influential studies and collections on film noir criticism

International Noir

International Noir PDF

Author: Homer B. Pettey

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-11-11

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0748691111

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Ranging from Japanese silent films and women's films to French, Hong Kong, and Nordic New Waves, this book explores the influence of noir on international cinematic traditions and challenges prevailing film scholarship. It includes extensive bibliography and filmographies for recommended reading and viewing.

Edges of Noir

Edges of Noir PDF

Author: Michael Mirabile

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2024-02-02

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1805392816

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Edges of Noir challenges the notion that noir film nearly vanished after 1958 until its subsequent “neo-noir” revival between 1973 and 1981. The 1960s, regardless of critical neglect, include some of the most provocative films of the post-World War II decades. Often formally disruptive and experimental, films including Shock Corridor (1963), Mirage (1965), The 3rd Voice (1960), and Point Blank (1967) evoke controversial issues of the era, deriving dynamic influences amongst exploitation cinema, sensationalistic American B movies, and the European New Wave movement. Whether the focus is on nuclear destruction, mind control, or surveillance, late noir films, above all else, vividly portray the collective fears from the time.

Symbolism

Symbolism PDF

Author: Florian Klaeger

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2022-10-03

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 3110775883

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Special Focus: "Omission", edited by Patrick Gill Throughout literary history and in many cultures, we encounter an astute use of conspicuous absences to conjure an imagined reality into a recipient’s mind. The term ‘omission’ as used in the present study, then, demarcates a common artistic phenomenon: a silence, blank, or absence, introduced against the recipient’s generic or experiential expectations, but which nonetheless frequently encapsulates the tenor of the work as a whole. Such omissions can be employed for their affective potential, when emotions represented or evoked by the text are deemed to be beyond words. They can be employed to raise epistemological questions, as when an omission marks the limits of what can be known. Ethical questions can also be approached by means of omissions, as when a character’s voice is omitted, for instance. Finally, omission always carries within it the potential to reflect on the media and genres on which it is brought to bear: as its efficacy depends on the recipient’s generic expectations, omission is frequently characterized by a high degree of meta-discursiveness. This volume investigates the various strategies with which the phenomenon of omission is employed across a range of textual forms and in different cultures to conclusively argue for its status as a highly effective and near-universal form of artistic signification.

Noir and Blanchot

Noir and Blanchot PDF

Author: William S. Allen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1501358928

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In dark or desperate times, the artwork is placed in a difficult position. Optimism seems naïve, while pessimism is no better. During some of the most demanding years of the 20th century two distinctive bodies of work sought to respond to this problem: the writings of Maurice Blanchot and American film noir. Both were seeking not only to respond to the times but also to critically reflect them, but both were often criticised for their own darkness. Understanding how this darkness became the means of responding to the darkness of the times is the focus of Noir and Blanchot, which examines key films from the period (including Double Indemnity and Vertigo) alongside Blanchot's writings (particularly his 1948 narrative Death Sentence). What emerges from this investigation is the complex manner in which these works disrupt the experience of time and the event and in doing so expose an entirely different mode of material expression.

Only the Names Have Been Changed

Only the Names Have Been Changed PDF

Author: Claudia Calhoun

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2022-10-18

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1477325417

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Among shifting politics, tastes, and technology in television history, one genre has been remarkably persistent: the cop show. Claudia Calhoun returns to Dragnet, the pioneering police procedural and an early transmedia franchise, appearing on radio in 1949, on TV and in film in the 1950s, and in later revivals. More than a popular entertainment, Dragnet was a signifier of America’s postwar confidence in government institutions—and a publicity vehicle for the Los Angeles Police Department. Only the Names Have Been Changed shows how Dragnet’s “realistic” storytelling resonated across postwar culture. Calhoun traces Dragnet’s “semi-documentary” predecessors, and shows how Jack Webb, Dragnet’s creator, worked directly with the LAPD as he produced a series that would likewise inspire public trust by presenting day-to-day procedural justice, rather than shootouts and wild capers. Yet this realism also set aside the seething racial tensions of Los Angeles as it was. Dragnet emerges as a foundational text, one that taught audiences to see police as everyday heroes not only on TV but also in daily life, a lesson that has come under scrutiny as Americans increasingly seek to redefine the relationship between policing and public safety.

Horizons of Difference

Horizons of Difference PDF

Author: Ruthanne Crapo Kim

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2022-07-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1438488475

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Horizons of Difference offers twelve original essays inspired by Luce Irigaray's complex, nuanced critique of Western philosophy, culture, and metaphysics, and her call to rethink our relationship to ourselves and the world through sexuate difference. Contributors engage urgent topics in a range of fields, including trans feminist theory, feminist legal theory, film studies, critical race theory, social-political theory, philosophy of religion, environmental ethics, philosophical aesthetics, and critical pedagogy. In so doing, they aim to push the scope of Irigaray's work beyond its horizon. Horizons of Difference seeks conversations that Irigaray herself has yet to fully consider and explores areas that stretch the limits of the notion of sexuate difference itself. Sexuate difference is a unifying mode of thought, bringing disparate disciplines and groups together. Yet it also resists unification in demanding that we continually rethink the basic coordinates of space, place, and identity. Ultimately, Horizons of Difference insists that the fragmented, wounded subjectivities within the dominant regime of masculine sameness can inform how we negotiate space, find place, and transform identity.