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How to read Walter Benjamin today? This book argues that the proper way is through an approach which recognizes and respects his own peculiar theorization of the act of reading and the politics of interpretation that this entails. The approach must be figural, that is, focused on images, and driven by the notion of actualization. Figural reading, in the very sui generis Benjaminian way, understands figures as constellations, whereby an image of the past juxtaposes them with an image of the present and is thus actualized. To apply this method to Benjamin's own work means first to identify some figures. The book singles out the Flâneur, the Detective, the Prostitute and the Ragpicker, and the...
Women writers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy reinvigorated the modern epistolary novel through their re-fashioning of the genre as a tool for examining women's roles and experiences. Addressing the Letter argues that many epistolary novels purposely tie narrative structure to thematic content, creating in the process powerful texts that reflect and challenge literary and socio-cultural norms. Through the lens of the genre, Laura A. Salsini considers how the works of authors including the Marchesa Colombi, Sibilla Aleramo, Gianna Manzini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Oriana Fallaci highlight such issues as love, the loss of ideals, lack of communication and connection, and feminist ideology. She also analyses what may be the first woman-authored Italian example of epistolary fiction: Orintia Romagnuoli Sacrati's Lettere di Giulia Willet (1818). In their reworking of the epistolary narrative form, Italian women writers challenged dominant assumptions about female behaviours, roles, relationships, and sexuality in modern Italy.
In Italy, as in most Western cultures, the 1960s was a dynamic and turbulent decade of social change. Dacia Maraini, in this short story collection, explores the vexing, tragic, and often humorous experiences of women living in modern urban Italy. With a style as lean as Samuel Beckett’s, and a love of the absurd that rivals Eugène Ionesco, Maraini’s stories are both poignant and wickedly funny. The writer’s ironic lens zooms in to examining sexual relations, working conditions, women’s issues, and family dynamics, illuminating the lives of an entire generation. With classic existential angst, Maraini’s characters are often profoundly dissatisfied with their situations, but also ill-equipped to initiate any real change. This feminist version of the absurd is deliciously wry and terrible. The stories have a real bite. Originally published as Mio marito in 1968, this is the first English translation of My Husband.
A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers. It also engages urgent questions about cinema's capacity for presenting a stable visual field, often at the expense of racially, sexually, or class-marked bodies. While fostering new ways of thinking about film history, A F...
DIVAnalyzes how the body was constructed and politicized in early modern Italy by exploring literary discourses of the period - plays, novellas, travel journals, poems, etc./div
Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywood’s constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking. Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers. Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are activel...
meXicana Encounters charts the dynamic and contradictory representation of Mexicanas and Chicanas in culture. Rosa Linda Fregoso's deft analysis of the cultural practices and symbolic forms that shape social identities takes her across a wide and varied terrain. Among the subjects she considers are the recent murders and disappearances of women in Ciudad Juárez; transborder feminist texts that deal with private, domestic forms of violence; how films like John Sayles's Lone Star re-center white masculinity; and the significance of la familia to the identity of Chicanas/os and how it can subordinate gender and sexuality to masculinity and heterosexual roles. Fregoso's self-reflexive approach to cultural politics embraces the movement for social justice and offers new insights into the ways that racial and gender differences are inscribed in cultural practices.
Key Frames examines the encounter between film studies and cultural studies, and offers new ways of reading popular film.
This volume reinvigorates the field of Classical Reception by investigating present-day culture, society, and politics, particularly gender, gender roles, and filmic constructions of masculinity and femininity which shape and are shaped by interacting economic, political, and ideological practices.