Download or read book Understanding the Leitmotif written by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through analysis, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the legacy of the leitmotif, from Wagner's Ring cycle to present-day Hollywood film music.
Download or read book Understanding the Leitmotif written by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The musical leitmotif, having reached a point of particular forcefulness in the music of Richard Wagner, has remained a popular compositional device up to the present day. In this book, Matthew Bribitzer-Stull explores the background and development of the leitmotif, from Wagner to the Hollywood adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and the Harry Potter series. Analyzing both concert music and film music, Bribitzer-Stull explains what the leitmotif is and establishes it as the union of two aspects: the thematic and the associative. He goes on to show that Wagner's Ring cycle provides a leitmotivic paradigm, a model from which we can learn to better understand the leitmotif across style periods. Arguing for a renewed interest in the artistic merit of the leitmotif, Bribitzer-Stull reveals how uniting meaning, memory, and emotion in music can lead to a richer listening experience and a better understanding of dramatic music's enduring appeal.
Download or read book The Manichean Leitmotif written by Arthur J. Graham and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 808 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I have presented a theory of form and structure, the Manichean leitmotif, which deals with the ideology and psychology of racism in American fiction. Through the theoretical and textual analyses undertaken here, we have followed the peculiar origins and development of an aesthetic theory of beauty and the sublime, specifically through a focus on Samuel Gilman's doctrinal force of contrasted extremes. Primarily through conventional rhetorical devices comprising the ascend-descend framing device and the triadic color structure, repressive attitudes conditioned by the defense of slavery and malignant images of dark humanity have undoubtedly crept into the expressive character of the literature. Without imaginative and constructive criticism, such as that offered by the theory of the Manichean leitmotif, there can be little or no conscious awareness of the continuing unconscious ideas and impulses of negation, resulting from deliberate skin-color symbolism in the literature. Whenever a reader identifies racially and culturally with certain fictional characters - - for example, Frank Norris' Polish Jew, half-breed Mexican, Chinese cigar-maker, big mulatto, and little colored girl in McTeague; Edgar Allen Poe's Jupiter in The gold bug; and William Dean Howells' Rhoda in An imperative duty - - that reader runs the risk of acquiring the attributes of his or her negation. This possibility holds true with even greater devastation when similar character traits are cinematically inculcated, because the aesthetic elements of form, sound, color and motion that comprise the doctrinal force of contrasted extremes are simultaneously heard and visualized without the tediousness of reading or skimming over their designs in the narrative. The cinema, therefore, not only tends to reinforce malignant images of dark humanity, but it also surpasses the print media in intensity of perception and verisimilitude. Fundamentally, regardless of the medium, repeated and systemic impressions of the self as buffoon and as avatar of evil and death create the degrading effects of worthlessness and non-achievement. The Manichean leitmotif causes psychic revulsions in non-white readers, in at least two important respects. First, it gives a distorted view of the past, present and even future roles of dark humanity in the social and intellectual life of America, often discrediting non-white heroes and relegating race relations to those of the feudalistic miscarriages of master and slave. Such portrayals often result in ennui and in loss of initiative, eventually, to penetrate the literature for its total intellectual and emotional content. Second, non-whites become dismayed because of the historic facts of their lives, and the mythopoetics thereof, do not correspond or coincide with the perversions of imbecility, evil, and death that are rendered, time and again, in works which convey negative skin-color symbolism through the doctrinal force of contrasted extremes. For white readers, the Manichean leitmotif is a terror-inducing device which reinforces racial stereotypes and which creates a mental block to understanding non-whites. Essentially, it prevents genuine probe into the complexities and variegated dimensions of non-whites, who, as comic and tragic avatars, are seldom, if ever, integral parts of plot. Whites are often given to believe, for example, that a piano falling on a "big mulatto" with a "resounding crack," and a Jupiter or Hark climbing up a tree are merely comic relief; but such presentations, in their deeper import, reflect a distorted view of humanity and of the world in literary forms. As an ideological design, the Manichean leitmotif plays on white fears of miscegenation, and on mistaken beliefs of racial superiority. Furthermore, such a design creates the rationale that non-whites are inferior seats of sin and crime, and are objects of suspicion and detection
Download or read book Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology written by Wolfgang U. Dressler and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural Morphology is the term the four authors of this monograph agreed on to cover the leitmotifs of their common and individual approaches in questions of theoretical morphology. The introduction summarizes the basic concepts and strategies of Natural Morphology, to be followed by Mayerthaler who deals with universal properties of inflectional morphology, and Wurzel with typological ones which depend on language specific properties of inflectional systems, and Dressler with universal and typological properties of word formation. The final chapter by Panagl is an indepth study of diachronic evidence for productivity in word formation and for the overlap of word formation with inflectional morphology.
Download or read book Metamorphosis written by David Gallagher and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The origins of selected instances of metamorphosis in Germanic literature are traced from their roots in Ovid's Metamorphoses, grouped roughly on an 'ascending evolutionary scale' (invertebrates, birds, animals, and mermaids). Whilst a broad range of mythological, legendary, fairytale and folktale traditions have played an appreciable part, Ovid's Metamorphoses is still an important comparative analysis and reference point for nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language narratives of transformations. Metamorphosis is most often used as an index of crisis: an existential crisis of the subject or a crisis in a society's moral, social or cultural values. Specifically selected texts for analysis include Jeremias Gotthelf's Die schwarze Spinne (1842) with the terrifying metamorphoses of Christine into a black spider, the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Die Verwandlung (1915), ambiguous metamorphoses in E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der goldne Topf (1814), Hermann Hesse's Piktors Verwandlungen (1925), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Christoph Ransmayr's Die letzte Welt (1988). Other mythical metamorphoses are examined in texts by Bachmann, Fouqué, Fontane, Goethe, Nietzsche, Nelly Sachs, Thomas Mann and Wagner, and these and many others confirm that metamorphosis is used historically, scientifically, for religious purposes; to highlight identity, sexuality, a dream state, or for metaphoric, metonymic or allegorical reasons.
Download or read book Reading Sounds written by Sean Zdenek and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-23 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of writing closed captions for television and DVD is not simply transcribing dialogue, as one might assume at first, but consists largely of making rhetorical choices. For Sean Zdenek, when captioners describe a sound they are interpreting and creating contexts, they are assigning significance, they are creating meaning that doesn t necessarily exist in the soundtrack or the script. And in nine chapters he analyzes the numerous complex rhetorical choices captioners make, from abbreviating dialogue so it will fit on the screen and keep pace with the editing, to whether and how to describe background sounds, accents, or slurred speech, to nonlinguistic forms of sound communication such as sighing, screaming, or laughing, to describing music, captioned silences (as when a continuous noise suddenly stops), and sarcasm, surprise, and other forms of meaning associated with vocal tone. Throughout, he also looks at closed captioning style manuals and draws on interviews with professional captioners and hearing-impaired viewers. Threading through all this is the novel argument that closed captions can be viewed as texts worthy of rhetorical analysis and that this analysis can lead the entertainment industry to better standards and practices for closed captioning, thereby better serve the needs of hearing-impaired viewers. The author also looks ahead to the work yet to be done in bringing better captioning practices to videos on the Internet, where captioning can take on additional functions such as enhancing searchability. While scholarly work has been done on captioning from a legal perspective, from a historical perspective, and from a technical perspective, no one has ever done what Zdenek does here, and the original analytical models he offers are richly interdisciplinary, drawing on work from the fields of technical communication, rhetoric, media studies, and disability studies."
Download or read book Le son en perspective written by Dominique Nasta and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2004 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected papers from the Archimedia conference held Oct. 2000, Brussels.
Download or read book Embodied Metaphors in Film Television and Video Games written by Kathrin Fahlenbrach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-05 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In cognitive research, metaphors have been shown to help us imagine complex, abstract, or invisible ideas, concepts, or emotions. Contributors to this book argue that metaphors occur not only in language, but in audio visual media well. This is all the more evident in entertainment media, which strategically "sell" their products by addressing their viewers’ immediate, reflexive understanding through pictures, sounds, and language. This volume applies cognitive metaphor theory (CMT) to film, television, and video games in order to analyze the embodied aesthetics and meanings of those moving images.
Download or read book Orality and Translation written by Paul Bandia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the current context of globalization, relocation of cultures, and rampant technologizing of communication, orality has gained renewed interest across disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Orality has shed its once negative image as primitive, non-literate, and exotic, and has grown into a major area of scientific interest and the focus of interdisciplinary research, including translation studies. As an important feature of human speech and communication, orality has featured prominently in studies related to pre-modernist traditions, modernist representations of human history, and postmodernist expressions of artistry such as in music, film, and other audiovisual media. Its wide appeal can be seen in the variety of this volume, in which contributors draw from a range of disciplines with orality as the point of intersection with translation studies. This book is unique in its exploration of orality and translation from an interdisciplinary perspective, and sets the groundwork for collaborative research among scholars across disciplines with an interest in the aesthetics and materiality of orality. This book was originally published as a special issue of Translation Studies.
Download or read book Heidegger and Homecoming written by Robert Mugerauer and published by . This book was released on 2014-02-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Martin Heidegger's philosophical works devoted themselves to challenging previously held ontological notions of what constitutes "being," and much of his work focused on how beings interact within particular spatial locations. Frequently, Heidegger used the motifs of homelessness and homecoming in order to express such spatial interactions, and despite early and continued recognition of the importance of homelessness and homecoming, this is the first sustained study of these motifs in his later works. Utilizing both literary and philosophical analysis, Heidegger and Homecoming reveals the deep figural unity of the German philosopher's writings, by exploring not only these homecoming and homelessness motifs, but also the six distinctive voices that structure the apparent disorder of his works. In this illuminating and comprehensive study, Robert Mugerauer argues that these motifs and Heidegger's many voices are required to overcome and replace conventional and linear methods of logic and representation. Making use of material that has been both neglected and yet to be translated into English, Heidegger and Homecoming explains the elaborate means with which Heidegger proposed that humans are able to open themselves to others, while at the same time preserve their self-identity.
Download or read book Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought written by Holly Watkins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to say that music is deeply moving? Or that music's aesthetic value derives from its deep structure? This study traces the widely employed trope of musical depth to its origins in German-language music criticism and analysis. From the Romantic aesthetics of E. T. A. Hoffmann to the modernist theories of Arnold Schoenberg, metaphors of depth attest to the cross-pollination of music with discourses ranging from theology, geology and poetics to psychology, philosophy and economics. The book demonstrates that the persistence of depth metaphors in musicology and music theory today is an outgrowth of their essential role in articulating and transmitting Germanic cultural values. While musical depth metaphors have historically served to communicate German nationalist sentiments, Watkins shows that an appreciation for the broad connotations of those metaphors opens up exciting new avenues for interpretation.
Download or read book Splatter Flicks written by Sara Caldwell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Features dozens of detailed interviews with directors, producers, F/X pros, and more • Horror movies get better distribution deals—so they’re great for independent filmmakers • Entertaining and informative, packed with insightful and sometimes hilarious anecdotes. Everyone who’s ever longed to make their very own horror movie needs a copy of Splatter Flicks, a comprehensive guide that shows aspiring filmmakers exactly how today’s most successful creators of horror finance, produce, and market their films. Interviews with the creative geniuses behind such low-budget moneymakers as Dead Serious, Till Death Do Us Part, Scarecrow, and many others reveal such dark secrets as how to make a movie for $ 2,000, how to get the best shrieks from scream queens, how to capture fear on film, how to make the perfect monster...the list goes on and on—it won’t stop—make it stop—aaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!!! Yes, Splatter Flicks is horrifying...in a good way. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.
Download or read book A History of Film Music written by Mervyn Cooke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-25 with total page 627 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a comprehensive and lively introduction to the major trends in film scoring from the silent era to the present day, focussing not only on dominant Hollywood practices but also offering an international perspective by including case studies of the national cinemas of the UK, France, India, Italy, Japan and the early Soviet Union. The book balances wide-ranging overviews of film genres, modes of production and critical reception with detailed non-technical descriptions of the interaction between image track and soundtrack in representative individual films. In addition to the central focus on narrative cinema, separate sections are also devoted to music in documentary and animated films, film musicals and the uses of popular and classical music in the cinema. The author analyses the varying technological and aesthetic issues that have shaped the history of film music, and concludes with an account of the modern film composer's working practices.
Download or read book Lark and Termite written by Jayne Anne Phillips and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-01-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author a "powerful and emotionally piercing" novel (The New York Times) set during the 1950 in West Virginia and Korea, that intertwines family secrets, war, dreams, and ghosts in a story about the love that unites us all. Lark and Termite is a rich, wonderfully alive novel about seventeen year old Lark and her brother, Termite, living in West Virginia in the 1950s. Their mother, Lola, is absent, while their aunt, Nonie, raises them as her own, and Termite’s father, Corporal Robert Leavitt, is caught up in the early days of the Korean War. Told with deep feeling, the novel invites us deep into the hearts and thoughts of Lark, on the verge of adulthood, and her brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk, who is filled with radiance. We are also with Corporal Leavitt, trapped by friendly fire alongside the Korean children he tries to rescue. We see Lark’s dreams for Termite and her own future, and how, with the aid of a childhood love and a spectral social worker, she makes them happen. We learn of Lola’s love for her soldier husband and her children, and unravel the mystery of her relationship with Nonie. We discover the lasting connections between past and future on the night the town experiences an overwhelming flood, and we follow Lark and Termite as their lives are changed forever.
Download or read book Brain Leitmotifs written by Roger Traub and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Towards a Theology of Relationship written by Michael Berra and published by James Clarke & Company. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the theme of relationship receiving renewed attention in a variety of areas, theological expressions of the subject are also being brought back into the spotlight. Although the concept of a personal relationship with God is a common Christian expression, it is often poorly defined. Here, Michael Berra draws on the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner to redefine and rehabilitate the analogy of relationship. Basing his study primarily on Brunner's seminal work Truth as Encounter, Berra proposes that relationship ought to be the central motif for the whole of theology. He investigates the theme in light of modern relationship science, arguing that God-human interaction categorically meets the definition of a relationship, and that it is existentially intended to be intimate. Scholars and church leaders will find in Berra's approach a refreshing voice in this dynamic field.
Download or read book Romanticism and Film written by Will Kitchen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-11-26 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between Romanticism and film remains one of the most neglected topics in film theory and history, with analysis often focusing on the proto-cinematic significance of Richard Wagner's music-dramas. One new and interesting way of examining this relationship is by looking beyond Wagner, and developing a concept of audio-visual explanation rooted in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, and employing it in the analysis of film discourse and representation. Using this concept of audio-visual explanation, the cultural image of the Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt, a contemporary of Wagner and another significant practitioner of Romantic audio-visual aesthetics, is examined in reference to specific case studies, including the rarely-explored films Song Without End (1960) and Lisztomania (1975). This multifaceted study of film discourse and representation employs Liszt as a guiding-thread, structuring a general exploration of the concept of Romanticism and its relationship with film more generally. This exploration is supported by new theories of representation based on schematic cognition, the philosophy of explanation, and the recently-developed film theory of Jacques Rancière. Individual chapters address the historical background of audio-visual explanation in Romantic philosophical aesthetics, Liszt's role in the historical discourses of film and film music, and various filmic representations of Liszt and his compositions. Throughout these investigations, Will Kitchen explores the various ways that films explain, or 'make sense' of things, through a 'Romantic' aesthetic combination of sound and vision.
