Download or read book Reluctant Skeptic written by Harry T. Craver and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-02-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The journalist and critic Siegfried Kracauer is best remembered today for his investigations of film and other popular media, and for his seminal influence on Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno. Less well known is his earlier work, which offered a seismographic reading of cultural fault lines in Weimar-era Germany, with an eye to the confrontation between religious revival and secular modernity. In this discerning study, historian Harry T. Craver reconstructs and richly contextualizes Kracauer’s early output, showing how he embodied the contradictions of modernity and identified the quasi-theological impulses underlying the cultural ferment of the 1920s.

Download or read book The Detective of Modernity written by Georgia Giannakopoulou and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the thought of – and is dedicated to – David Frisby, one of the leading sociologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Presenting original examinations of his unique social theory and underlining his interdisciplinary approach to the critical interpretation of modern metropolitan society and culture, it emphasises Frisby’s legacy in highlighting the role of the social researcher as a collector, reader, observer, detective and archivist of the phenomena and ideas that exemplify the modern metropolis as society. With contributions from sociologists, cultural theorists, historians of the city, urban geographers and designers, and architectural historians and theorists, The Detective of Modernity constitutes a wide-ranging engagement with Frisby’s profound legacy in social and cultural theory.

Download or read book Kracauer written by Jörg Später and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Siegfried Kracauer was one of the most important German thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings on Weimar culture, mass society, photography and film were groundbreaking and they anticipated many of the themes later developed members of the Frankfurt School and other cultural theorists. No less remarkable were the circumstances under which he made these contributions. After his early years as a journalist in Germany, the rise of the Nazis forced Kracauer into exile – first in Paris and then, after a protracted flight via Marseilles and Lisbon, to the United States. The existential challenges, personal losses and unrelenting hardship Kracauer faced during these years of exile formed the backdrop against which he offered his acute observations of modern life. Jörg Später provides the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary man. Based on extensive archival research, Später’s biography expertly traces the key influences on Kracauer’s intellectual development and presents his most important works and ideas with great clarity. At the same time, Später ably documents the intensity of Kracauer’s personal relationships, the trauma of his flight and exile, and his embrace of his new homeland, where, finally, the ‘groundlessness’ of refugee existence gave way to a more stable life and, with it, some of the intellectually most fruitful years of Kracauer’s career. The result is a vivid portrait of a man driven both by an urge to capture reality – to attend to the things that are ‘overlooked or misjudged’, that still ‘lack a name’, as he put it – and by a need to find his place in a hostile, threatening world.

Download or read book Siegfried Kracauer written by Gertrud Koch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-03-27 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naïve realist, appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed as the interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky. But he is most widely thought of as the odd uncle of famed Frankfurt School critical theorists Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. Recently, however, scholars have rediscovered in Kracauer's writings a philosopher, sociologist, and film theorist important beyond his associations--and perhaps one of the most significant cultural critics of the twentieth century. Gertrud Koch advances this Kracauer renaissance with the first-ever critical assessment of his entire body of work. Koch's analysis, which is concise without sacrificing thoroughness or sophistication, covers both Kracauer's best-known publications (e.g., From Caligari to Hitler, in which he gleans the roots of National Socialism in the films of the Weimar Republic) and previously underexamined texts, including two newly discovered autobiographical novels. Because Kracauer's wide-ranging works emerge from no rigidly unified approach, instead always remaining open to unusual and highly individual perspectives, Koch resists the temptation to force generalization. She does, however, identify recurring tropes in Kracauer's lifetime effort to perceive the basic posture and composition of particular cultures through their visual surfaces. Koch also finds in Kracauer a surprisingly contemporary cultural commentator, whose ideas speak directly to current discussions on film, urban modernity, feminism, cultural representation, violence, and other themes. This book was long-awaited in Germany, as well as widely and well reviewed. Now translated into English for the first time, it will fuel already growing interest in the United States, where Kracauer lived and wrote from 1941 until his death in 1966. It will attract the attention of students and scholars working in Film Studies, German Studies, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and History.

Download or read book The Art of Taking a Walk written by Anke Gleber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendor and squalor. Gleber examines this often elusive figure in the particular contexts of Weimar Germany and the intellectual sphere of Walter Benjamin, with whom the concept of flanerie is often associated. She sketches the European influences that produced the German flaneur and establishes the figure as a pervasive presence in Weimar culture, as well as a profound influence on modern perceptions of public space. The book begins by exploring the theory of literary flanerie and the technological changes--street lighting, public transportation, and the emergence of film--that gave a new status to the activities of seeing and walking in the modern city. Gleber then assesses the place of flanerie in works by Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and other representatives of Weimar literature, arts, and theory. She draws particular attention to the works of Franz Hessel, a Berlin flaneur who argued that flanerie is a "reading" of the city that perceives passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. Gleber also examines connections between flanerie and Weimar film, and discusses female flanerie as a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. The book is a deeply original and searching reassessment of the complex intersections among modernity, vision, and public space.

Download or read book Shapes of Time written by Michael McGillen and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of time—beyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of history—at the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernism—those of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musil—he identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology. Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concepts of temporal and spatial form, McGillen contends, contribute to the understanding not only of modernist literature but also of larger theoretical concerns within modern cultural and intellectual history.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Detective Fiction written by Casey Cothran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.

Download or read book Detectives Dystopias and Poplit written by Bruce Campbell and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2014 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first broad treatment of German genre fiction, containing innovative new essays on a variety of genres and foregrounding concerns of gender, environmentalism, and memory. Some of the most exciting research and teaching in the field of German Studies is being done on "genre fiction," including detective fiction, science fiction, and what is often called "poplit," to name but a few. Such non-canonical literature has long been marginalized by the German tradition of Bildung and the disciplinary practice of German literary studies (Germanistik). Even today, when the examination of non-canonical texts is well established and uncontroversial in other academic contexts, such texts remain understudied in German. And yet, the trend toward "German Studies" and "cultural studies" approaches within the field has raised considerable interest in theanalysis of genre fiction, resulting in both a great deal of new scholarship and a range of new courses. This first broad treatment of German genre fiction brings together innovative new scholarship, foregrounding themes of gender, environmentalism, and memory. It is an ideal companion to research and teaching. Written in accessible English, it speaks to a wide variety of disciplines beyond German Studies. Contributors: Bruce B. Campbell, Ray Canoy, Kerry Dunne, Sonja Fritzsche, Maureen O. Gallagher, Adam R. King, Molly Knight, Vibeke Rützou Petersen, Evan Torner, and Ailsa Wallace. Bruce B. Campbell is Associate Professor of German Studies at the College ofWilliam and Mary. Alison Guenther-Pal is Assistant Professor of German and Film Studies at Lawrence University. Vibeke Rützou Petersen is Professor Emerita of Women's Studies at Drake University.

Download or read book The Mass Ornament written by Siegfried Kracauer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mass Ornament today remains a refreshing tribute to popular culture, and its impressively interdisciplinary writings continue to shed light not only on Kracauer's later work but also on the ideas of the Frankfurt School, the genealogy of film theory and cultural studies, Weimar cultural politics, and, not least, the exigencies of intellectual exile.

Download or read book From Pushkin to Popular Culture written by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.

Download or read book Major Realist Film Theorists written by Aitken Ian Aitken and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1910s to the emergence of structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s, the writings of John Grierson, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Georg Lukacs dominated realist film theory. In this critical anthology, the first collection to address their work in one volume, a wide range of international scholars explore the interconnections between their ideas and help generate new understandings of this important, if neglected, field. Challenging preconceptions about 'classical' theory and the nature of realist representation, and in the process demonstrating how this body of work can be seen as a cohesive theoretical model, this invaluable collection will help return the realist paradigm of film theory to the forefront of academic enquiry.

Download or read book andererseits Yearbook of Transatlantic German Studies written by William Collins Donahue and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2023-07-31 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: andererseits seeks to provide a forum for unique and exciting research and reflections on topics related to the German-speaking world and the field of German Studies. Works presented in the publication come from a wide variety of genres including book reviews, poetry, essays, editorials, forum discussions, academic notes, lectures, and traditional peer-reviewed academic articles. In addition, contributions by journalists, librarians, archivists, and other commentators interested in German Studies broadly conceived. By publishing such a diverse array of material, we hope to demonstrate the extraordinary value of the humanities in general, and German Studies in particular, on a variety of intellectual and cultural levels. Contributors to this volume: Yvonne Delhey, Andreas Erb, Bernhard Fischer, Rüdiger Görner, Spencer Hawkins, Steffen Kaup, Selim Özdogan, Hugh Ridley, Gertrud Maria Rösch, Peter Stamm, Wim Wenders, and others.

Download or read book Dreams of Modernity written by Laura Marcus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Marcus is one of the leading literary critics of modernist literature and culture. Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema covers the period from around 1880 to 1930, when modernity as a form of social and cultural life fed into the beginnings of modernism as a cultural form. Railways, cinema, psychoanalysis and the literature of detection - and their impact on modern sensibility - are four of the chief subjects explored. Marcus also stresses the creativity of modernist women writers, including H. D., Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. The overriding themes of this work bear on the understanding of the early twentieth century as a transitional age, thus raising the question of how 'the moderns' understood the conditions of their own modernity.

Download or read book Veteran Poetics written by Kate McLoughlin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first full-length study of the war veteran in literature, Kate McLoughlin draws new critical attention to a figure central to national life. Offering fresh readings of canonical and non-canonical works, she shows how authors from William Wordsworth to J. K. Rowling have deployed veterans to explore questions that are simultaneously personal, political, and philosophical: What does a community owe to those who serve it? What can be recovered from the past? Do people stay the same over time? Are there right times of life at which to do certain things? Is there value in experience? How can wisdom be shared? Veteran Poetics features veterans who travel in time, cause havoc with their reappearances, solve murders, refuse to stop talking about the wars they have been in, and refuse to say a word about them. Through this last trait, they also prompt consideration of possible critical responses to silence.

Download or read book Uncertain Justice written by Nicoletta Di Ciolla and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-22 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The crime genre entered Italy in the late nineteenth century, and if initially Italian authors followed models developed abroad—principally in the United States, England and France—a uniquely Italian brand began to emerge soon. Il giallo, as the crime genre has been known in Italy since the 1930s, proved to be the ideal instrument to confront pressing and often uncomfortable issues which were pertinent to the Italian context: it became a useful tool to restore, symbolically at least, the truth and justice that were, and still are, perceived by a large part of the Italian reading public to be systematically denied in reality. In today’s Italy, the crime genre, and particularly its noir sub-genre, narrates so that readers might remember, so that they might take heed and action, turning cognition into an act of resistance against oblivion and of rebellion against injustice. Uncertain Justice explores three broad areas that contemporary Italian noir literature appears particularly keen to debate, retrieving them from the silence to which they might otherwise be consigned: unresolved historical and political legacies, the repercussions of which still inform and affect life and practices in the present times; the problematic institution of the family, considered as the bedrock of Italian culture and the founding principle of Italian society, with specific attendant questions of gender politics; and the justice system seen through some of its operators, nominally in charge of putting the wrongs right and frequently accused of preventing this from happening. These explorations are conducted through an analysis of texts published in the last twenty years, which represent an effort to expose and counter injustice through the power of the word. Crime literature authors often revisit recent Italian history in their novels, and genre fiction plays a prominent role in acts of resistance against cover-ups or revisionist views of history. The volume starts with an analysis of this role, through novels that look back at the years of the fascist regime and, more recently, at the period from the anni di piombo onwards. It then considers the contribution made to the giallo and noir genre by women writers, looking at the effects that female practitioners in Italy have had on the ethics and aesthetics of a genre that, in other cultures, has traditionally been firmly conservative. A further section examines novels set in a familial context and looks at a range of family dynamics, expressed in the relationships between mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, large extended families or small nuclear ones. If some of the texts expose the devastating effects of the violence perpetrated “in the name of love,” others more positively offer hope, demonstrating how more desirable options do exist and can be pursued. Finally the volume looks at justice as a system and at its practitioners, as, in an interesting development peculiar to Italy, a significant number of judges, lawyers and senior police officers have recently become involved in crime fiction writing. The concluding chapter investigates the contribution that these “specialists,” who have extensive theoretical and technical knowledge in a field which crime fiction routinely frequents, can make to the genre; it also analyses whether these authors, who bring together the moral function of unveiling the truth (prerogative of the investigator) and the social function of rectifying a wrong (prerogative of the upholders of the law), may have a role in forming a more ethically and socially aware Italian citizen.

Download or read book Detecting Detection written by Peter Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We indulge our fascination with detection in many ways, only some of which occur in the detective story. In fact, modern fiction regularly uses elements of a detective narrative to tell another story altogether, to engage characters, narrators, and readers with questions of identity, with examinations of moral and ethical reasoning, with critiques of social and political injustices, and with the metaphysics of meaning itself. Detective plots cross cultural and national boundaries and occur in different ways and different genres. Taken together, they suggest important contemporary understandings of who and what we are, how and what we aspire to become. Detecting Detection gathers writing from the UK, North and South America, Europe, and Asia to draw together instances of the detective plot in contemporary fiction. It is unique not only in addressing the theme-a recurring one in modern literature-but in tracking the interest in detectives and detection across international borders.

Download or read book Trends in Contemporary Italian Narrative 1980 2007 written by Gillian Ania and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ‘new Italian narrative’ that began to be spoken about in the 1980s was not associated with a single writer or movement but with an eclectic and varied production. The eight essays that make up this volume set out to give a flavour of the breadth and range of recent trends and developments. The collection opens with two essays on crime fiction. In the first, Luca Somigli examines novels dealing with topical issues or recent history and which reveal a strong indigenous and regional tradition, while in the second, Nicoletta McGowan discusses the particular case of a noir by Claudia Salvatori. They are followed by essays on two of Italy’s best-known contemporary writers: Marina Spunta’s essay explores the representation of space, place and landscape in the work of Gianni Celati and photographer Luigi Ghirri, while Darrell O’Connell analyses the fiction of Vincenzo Consolo, and his struggle to find a means of representing an ethical stance within fiction. Two essays then examine the role of the anthology for young writers: Charlotte Ross and Derek Duncan in the context of lesbian and gay writing, looking at identity politics and the problematics of categorization; Monica Jansen and Inge Lanslots in that of the “Young Cannibals”, and their often unsettling non-literary language and orientation towards cinema, pop music and slang. The penultimate essay, by Jennifer Burns, discusses the literature of migrants to Italy, focusing on questions of identity, memory, mobility and language, while the final contribution, by Gillian Ania, is a study of apocalypse and dystopia in contemporary writing, looking at novels by Vassalli, Capriolo, Avoledo and Pispisa. "This volume examines Italian narrative from the 1980s to the present, from the original viewpoint of genres, categories, trends, rather than author-based analyses. It highlights the innovations of the last twenty years, incorporating into the various themes well known writers like Consolo, Celati and Vassalli, with relative newcomers like Avoledo and Pispisa. The contributors to the volume, academics from the UK, Ireland, Canada, Belgium, cover a wide range of themes which have come to the fore during this period, ranging from detective stories (both the giallo and the noir) to lesbian and gay writing, to immigration literature in Italian, to the study of apocalypse and dystopia. The themes are contextualized in the socio-political and cultural changes taking place in Italy, and parallel to this the temporal moments of the narratives are in turn related to their historical realities. This is a richly woven account which presents post '80s Italian narrative from a new and stimulating angle, in eight lucid and informative essays which will be welcomed by all those interested in contemporary fiction in its cultural context." —Professor Anna Laura Lepschy, Department of Italian, University College London