Download or read book Ghost watching American Modernity written by María del Pilar Blanco and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ghost-watching American Modernity explores the intersections of haunting and space in nineteenth- and twentieth-century works from Spanish America and the US. In an intervention that will reconfigure the critical uses of haunting for scholars across different fields, Blanco advances ghost-watching as a method for rediscovering haunting on its own terms.
Download or read book The Civil War Dead and American Modernity written by Ian Finseth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead. Tracing their representational afterlife across a massive array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, Ian Finseth maintains that the war dead played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans experienced and understood the modernization of the United States. From eyewitness accounts of battle to photographs and paintings, and from full-dress histories of the war to fictional narratives, Finseth shows that the dead circulated through American cultural life in ways that we have not fully appreciated, and that require an expanded range of interpretive strategies to understand. While individuals grieved and relinquished their own loved ones, the collective Civil War dead, Finseth argues, came to form a kind of symbolic currency that informed Americans' melancholic relationship to their own past. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, as the United States embarked decisively upon its technological, geopolitical, and intellectual modernity, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self. At the same time, they seemed to represent a traumatic break in history and the loss of a simpler world, and their meanings could never be completely contained by the political discourse that surrounded them. Reconstructing the formal, rhetorical, and ideological strategies by which postwar American society reimagined, and continues to reimagine, the Civil War dead, Finseth also shows that a strain of critical thought was alert to this dynamic from the very years of the war itself. The Civil War Dead and American Modernity is at once a study of the politics of mortality, the disintegration of American Victorianism, and the role of visual and literary art in both forming and undermining social consensus.
Download or read book Theatre and Ghosts written by M. Luckhurst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre and Ghosts brings theatre and performance history into dialogue with the flourishing field of spectrality studies. Essays examine the histories and economies of the material operations of theatre, and the spectrality of performance and performer.
Download or read book Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction written by David Coughlan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-05 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines representations of the specter in American twentieth and twenty-first-century fiction. David Coughlan’s innovative structure has chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, particularly within the context of his 1993 text, Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter—that is, without ghost writing.
Download or read book The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema written by Murray Leeder and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study sees the nineteenth century supernatural as a significant context for cinema’s first years. The book takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a “ghostly,” “spectral” or “haunted” medium and asks what made such association possible. Examining the history of the projected image and supernatural displays, psychical research and telepathy, spirit photography and X-rays, the skeletons of the danse macabre and the ghostly spaces of the mind, it uncovers many lost and fascinating connections. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema locates film’s spectral affinities within a history stretching back to the beginning of screen practice and forward to the digital era. In addition to examining the use of supernatural themes by pioneering filmmakers like Georges Méliès and George Albert Smith, it also engages with the representations of cinema’s ghostly past in Guy Maddin’s recent online project Seances (2016). It is ideal for those interested in the history of cinema, the study of the supernatural and the pre-history of the horror film.
Download or read book Rethinking Juan Rulfo s Creative World written by Nuala Finnegan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo’s cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes’ work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.
Download or read book Haunting Without Ghosts written by Juliana Martínez and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, William M. LeoGrande Prize, Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, 2022 For half a century, cultural production in Colombia has labored under the weight of magical realism—above all, the works of Gabriel García Márquez—where ghosts told stories about the country’s violent past and warned against a similarly gruesome future. Decades later, the story of violence in Colombia is no less horrific, but the critical resources of magical realism are depleted. In their wake comes "spectral realism." Juliana Martínez argues that recent Colombian novelists, filmmakers, and artists—from Evelio Rosero and William Vega to Beatriz González and Erika Diettes—share a formal and thematic concern with the spectral but shift the focus from what the ghost is toward what the specter does. These works do not speak of ghosts. Instead, they use the specter to destabilize reality by challenging the authority of human vision and historical chronology. By introducing the spectral into their work, these artists decommodify well-worn modes of representing violence and create a critical space from which to seek justice for the dead and disappeared. A Colombia-based study, Haunting without Ghosts brings powerful insight to the politics and ethics of spectral aesthetics, relevant for a variety of sociohistorical contexts.
Download or read book Instead of modernity written by Andrew Ginger and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revisits the claim that a key dimension of cultural modernity – understood as a turn to the autonomy of the signs and the erasure of the 'face of man' - arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It presents an alternative to that obsession, focusing instead on the aesthetic appreciation of forms through which connections are realised across place and time. The book is one of few to offer a comparative approach to numerous major writers and artists of this period over diverse countries. Specifically, the comparative approach overcomes the constitutively ambiguous relation between the modern and the Hispanic. The Hispanic is often imagined as at once foundational for and excluded from the modern world. Its reincorporation into the story of the mid-century unsettles the notion of modernity. The book offers instead an experiment in writing, tracing commonalities across place and time, and drawing on mid-century expressions of such likenesses.
Download or read book Haunted Families and Temporal Normativity in Hispanic Horror Films written by Charles St-Georges and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interactions between ghosts and families in three recent horror films from the Spanish-speaking world that, rather than explicitly referencing recent political violence, speak to the societal conditions and everyday normative violence that serve as preconditions for political violence. This study deconstructs intersectional processes of racially and sexually normative subject formation—and its oppositional other, ghostly erasure—that are framed by a common temporal logic, wherein full citizenship is contingent upon a nation's dominant notions of contemporaneousness and whether individuals properly inhabit prescriptive timelines of (re)productivity. St-Georges’s study explores ways in which ghosts and families are manipulated in each national imaginary as a strategy for negotiating volatility within symbolic order: a tactic that can either naturalize or challenge normative discourses. As a literary and cinematic trope, ghosts are particularly useful vehicles for the exploration of national imaginaries and the dominant or competing cultural attitudes towards a country's history, and thus, the articulation of a present political reality. The rhetorical figure of the family is also key in this process as a mechanism for expressing national allegories, for expressing generational anxieties about a nation's relationship to time, and for organizing societies and social subjects as such, interpellating them into or excluding them from national imaginaries. By proposing these specific coordinates—ghosts and families—and by mapping their relationship between Spain and Latin America, Troubling Timelines proposes a study of a temporal framework that, besides bridging the traditional area-studies divide across the Atlantic, creates a space for interdisciplinary inquiry while also responding to increasing demand for studies that focus on intersectionality.
Download or read book The New Modernist Studies written by Douglas Mao and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book specifically devoted to the history and prospects of the new modernist studies.
Download or read book Geopolitics Culture and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America written by María del Pilar Blanco and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2023-03-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship among science, politics, and culture in Latin American history. Scholars from a variety of fields including literature, sociology, and geography bring to light many of the cultural exchanges that have produced and spread scientific knowledge from the early colonial period to the present day. Among many topics, these essays describe ideas on health and anatomy in a medical text from sixteenth-century Mexico, how fossil discoveries in Patagonia inspired new interpretations of the South American landscape, and how Argentinian physicist Rolando García influenced climate change research and the field of epistemology. Through its interdisciplinary approach, Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America shows that such scientific advancements fueled a series of visionary utopian projects throughout the region, as countries grappling with the legacy of colonialism sought to modernize and to build national and regional identities.
Download or read book Horrors of War written by Cynthia J. Miller and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-05-14 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Battlefields have traditionally been considered places where the spirits of the dead linger, and popular culture brings those thoughts to life. Supernatural tales of war told in print, on screen, and in other media depict angels, demons, and legions of the undead fighting against—or alongside—human soldiers. Ghostly war ships and phantom aircraft carry on their never-to-be-completed missions, and the spirits—sometimes corpses—of dead soldiers return to confront the enemies who killed them, comrades who betrayed them, or leaders who sacrificed them. In Horrors of War: The Undead on the Battlefield, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper have assembled essays that explore the meaning and significance of these tales. Among the questions that the volume seeks to answer are: How do supernatural stories engage with cultural attitudes toward war? In what ways do these stories reflect or challenge the popular memories of particular wars? How do they ask us to think again about battlefield heroism, military ethics, and the politics of sacrifice? Divided into four sections, chapters examine undead war stories in film (Carol for Another Christmas, The Devil’s Backbone), television (The Twilight Zone), literature (The Bloody Red Baron, Devils of D-Day), comics (Weird War Tales, The Haunted Tank), graphic novels (The War of the Trenches), and gaming (Call of Duty: World at War). Featuring contributions from a diverse group of international scholars, these essays address such themes as monstrous enemies and enemies made monstrous, legacies and memories of war, and the war dead who refuse to rest. Drawing together stories from across wars, branches of service, and generations of soldiers—and featuring more than fifty illustrations—Horrors of War will be of interest to scholars of film, popular culture, military history, and cultural history.
Download or read book Modernism Evolution of an Idea written by Sean Latham and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-10-22 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What exactly is “modernism”? And how and why has its definition changed over time? Modernism: Evolution of an Idea is the first book to trace the development of the term “modernism” from cultural debates in the early twentieth century to the dynamic contemporary field of modernist studies. Rather than assuming and recounting the contributions of modernism's chief literary and artistic figures, this book focuses on critical formulations and reception through topics such as: - The evolution of “modernism” from a pejorative term in intellectual arguments, through its condemnation by Pope Pius X in 1907, and on to its subsequent centrality to definitions of new art by T. S. Eliot, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, F. R. Leavis, Edmund Wilson, and Clement Greenberg - New Criticism and its legacies in the formation of the modernist canon in anthologies, classrooms, and literary histories - The shifting conceptions of modernism during the rise of gender and race studies, French theory, Marxist criticism, postmodernism, and more - The New Modernist Studies and its contemporary engagements with the politics, institutions, and many cultures of modernism internationally With a glossary of key terms and movements and a capacious critical bibliography, this is an essential survey for students and scholars working in modernist studies at all levels.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature written by Yogita Goyal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a new map of American literature in the global era, analyzing the multiple meanings of transnationalism.
Download or read book Surveying the American Tropics written by Maria Cristina Fumagalli and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays from distinguished international scholars that explore the idea of a literary geography of the American Tropics.
Download or read book Mind the Ghost written by Sonja Stojanovic and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.
Download or read book A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English written by Sherri L. Brown and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gothic began as a designation for barbarian tribes, was associated with the cathedrals of the High Middle Ages, was used to describe a marginalized literature in the late eighteenth century, and continues today in a variety of forms (literature, film, graphic novel, video games, and other narrative and artistic forms). Unlike other recent books in the field that focus on certain aspects of the Gothic, this work directs researchers to seminal and significant resources on all of its aspects. Annotations will help researchers determine what materials best suit their needs. A Research Guide to Gothic Literature in English covers Gothic cultural artifacts such as literature, film, graphic novels, and videogames. This authoritative guide equips researchers with valuable recent information about noteworthy resources that they can use to study the Gothic effectively and thoroughly.
