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This volume aims to intensify the interdisciplinary dialogue on comics and related popular multimodal forms (including manga, graphic novels, and cartoons) by focusing on the concept of medial, mediated, and mediating agency. To this end, a theoretically and methodologically diverse set of contributions explores the interrelations between individual, collective, and institutional actors within historical and contemporary comics cultures. Agency is at stake when recipients resist hegemonic readings of multimodal texts. In the same manner, “authorship” can be understood as the attribution of agency of and between various medial instances and roles such as writers, artists, colorists, letterers, or editors, as well as with regard to commercial rights holders such as publishing houses or conglomerates and reviewers or fans. From this perspective, aspects of comics production (authorship and institutionalization) can be related to aspects of comics reception (appropriation and discursivation), and circulation (participation and canonization), including their potential for transmedialization and making contributions to the formation of the public sphere.
This work discusses the way in which action movies have responded to the visual and narrative challenge of depicting terrorist violence after 9/11, when the spectacular representation of terrorist violence – and by extension the consumers of these imagers – was considered as complicit behaviour. If terrorism is theatre, who goes to see the show? A close-reading of exemplary movies (V for Vendetta, Munich, and Children of Men) concentrates on three key aspects: How is terrorist violence justified, especially in comparison to other forms of violence? How is the audience implicitly positioned? And finally, what is the role and scope of the films’ visual short-cuts, iconic “real” image...
Taking early 21st century Britain as a case study, Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: A British Case Study presents an intervention into the scholarship on the representation of the Holocaust on film. Based on a study of audience responses to select films, Stefanie Rauch demonstrates that the reception of films about the Holocaust is a complex process that we cannot understand through textual analysis alone, but by also paying attention to individual reception processes. This book restores the agency of viewers and takes seriously their diverse responses to representations of the Holocaust. It demonstrates that viewers’ interpretative resources play an important role in film reception. V...
Investigation into how a shared narrative of law and cinema produces ways of collectively remembering mass violence in postcolonial India.
A major intervention in media studies theorizes the politics and aesthetics of internet video The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted throughout the world not by television or even social media, but in short videos produced by the participants themselves and circulated anonymously on the internet. In The People Are Not An Image, Snowdon explores this radical shift in revolutionary self-representation, showing that the political consequences of these videos cannot be located without reference to their aesthetic form. Looking at videos from Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, Snowdon attends closely to the circumstances of both their production and circulation, drawing on a wide range of historical and theoretical material, to discover what they can tell us about the potential for revolution in our time and the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralized and vernacular medium.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain presents a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to the current research on pain from a variety of scholarly angles within Literature, Film and Media, Game Studies, Art History, Hispanic Studies, Memory Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Law. Through the combination of these perspectives, this volume goes beyond the existing structures within and across these disciplines framing new concepts of pain in attitude, practice, language, and ethics of response to pain. Comprised of fourteen unique essays, Beyond the Rhetoric of Pain maintains a common thread of analysis using a historical and cultural lens to explore the rhetoric of pain. Considering various methodologies, this volume questions the ethical, social and political demands pain makes upon those who feel, watch or speak it. Arranged to move from historical cases and relevance of pain in history towards the contemporary movement, topics include pain as a social figure, rhetorical tool, artistic metaphor, and political representation in jurisprudence.
This book examines the figure of the sleeper agent as part of post-9/11 political, journalistic and fictional discourse. There is a tendency to discuss the terroristic threat after 9/11 as either a faraway enemy to be hunted down by military force or, on the other hand, as a ubiquitous, intangible threat that required constant alertness at home. The missing link between these two is the sleeper agent – the foreign enemy hiding among US citizens. By analyzing popular television shows, several US comic books, and a broad variety of Hollywood films that depict sleeper agents direct or allegorically, this book explores how a shift in perspective—from terrorist to sleeper agent—brings new insights into our understanding of post-9/11 representations of terrorism. The book’s interdisciplinary focus between media studies, cultural studies, and American studies, suggests that it will find an audience in a variety of fields, including historical research, narratology, popular culture, as well as media and terrorism studies.
Examines the ways in which moving images can help us better understand factual political tortureExamines role of images and film in (mis)understanding of tortureOffers synergised knowledge through comparative angle, exploring differences and continuities of torture cases which were documented to vastly different extentsIncludes key popular movies, independent films as well as serial televisionCombines serious film analysis with ethical-political questions and historically and theoretically informed researchExpands on the latest developments of comparative media scholarship, and integrates the nostalgic, material and affective "e;turn."e; Academic work on the subject of torture tends to mirro...
Der Begriff der Agency – nur unbefriedigend als 'Handlungsmacht', 'Handlungspotenzial' oder 'Handlungsinitiative' ins Deutsche übersetzbar – ist in verschiedensten wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen unverzichtbar, um Prozesse gegenseitiger Einflussnahme, die Reichweite oder den Ausschluss von Handlungsspielräumen oder Verantwortung für konkrete Vorgänge zu bestimmen. In der Medien- und Kommunikationswissenschaft hat er lange Zeit keine systematische Rolle gespielt. Erst in Reaktion auf Perspektiven der seit den 1990er-Jahren boomenden Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie (ANT) und daran anschließenden Entwürfen der Medienwissenschaft wurden vergleichbare Konzepte von medial verteilter Handlungsmach...
Assessing his work in the context of film aesthetics, philosophy, history, adaptation studies and cultural studies, this is the first book-length English-language anthology about this important director's cinema, offering a wide range of perspectives by a diverse range of international scholars.