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This volume focuses on postmodern film aesthetics and contemporary challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating analyses of Hollywood cinema. It explores conceptions of the classical, modernist, post-classical/new Hollywood, and their construction as linear history of style in which postmodernism forms a debatable final act. This history is challenged by using Jean-François Lyotard's non-linear conception of postmodernism in order to view postmodern aesthetics as a paradigm that can occur across the history of Hollywood. This study also explores 'nihilistic' theorists of the postmodern, Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson, and 'affirmative' theorists, notably Linda Hutcheon, charting the ways in which the latter provide the means to conceptualize nuanced and positive variants of postmodern aesthetics and deploying them in the analysis of Hollywood films, including Bombshell, Sherlock Junior, and Kill Bill.
The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism offers a comprehensive introduction to postmodernism. The Companion examines the different aspects of postmodernist thought and culture that have had a significant impact on contemporary cultural production and thinking. Topics discussed by experts in the field include postmodernism's relation to modernity, and its significance and relevance to literature, film, law, philosophy, architecture, religion and modern cultural studies. The volume also includes a useful guide to further reading and a chronology. This is an essential aid for students and teachers from a range of disciplines interested in postmodernism in all its incarnations. Accessible and comprehensive, this Companion addresses the many issues surrounding this elusive, enigmatic and often controversial topic.
This text integrates the three major branches of chemistry, with the aim of enabling students to tackle more easily the problems within the subject and to apply chemistry to real-life situations.
A captivating, atmospheric mystery set in the crystalline winterland of Russia. Abandoned in a blinding blizzard in the wintry wilds of Russia, Sophie Smith fears for her life. But just like in a fairy tale, a princess comes to her rescue: the beautiful, exotic Anna Volkonskaya. Over a river of ice in a horse-drawn sleigh, she brings Sophie and her friends to a magnificent, if weathered, winter palace. At first, Sophie is enchanted by Princess Anna's stories of long-ago royalty, of white wolves and gray diamonds. But when the princess takes a particular interest in her, Sophie grows concerned. What is her place in the sinister mystery that surrounds her? Even as the wind and wolves howl outside, is she more in danger now, a prisoner of the palace, than she ever was lost in the snow?
This book follows a middle-class knightly family from France to England in 1066 and its journey over the next six centuries. It focuses on the development in the status and roles of the knight, the roles of women, and the changes in religion from Catholic to Church of England to Puritan.
Thinking in Images addresses the current crisis in film theory by offering a new methodology for interrelating theory and film texts. Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Michele Le Doeuff the author argures that philosophy is reliant on socio-cultural images, such as the figures of the veiled woman, the femme fatale and the seductress. The author traces the key role played by such images of woman in the theorisations of beauty, art and truth offered by Nietzsche and his successors: Derrida, Kofman and Baudrillard. Importantly, the recognition that images are crucial to theorising means that film images have the capacity to challenge and change previous theoretical models. This is demonstrated by a case study of three films from the Dietrich/Sternberg cycle: The Scarlet Empress, The Devil is a Woman and Shanghai Express. The detailed readings focus on the ways in which Dietrich's glamorous characters challenge the theorisation of woman as a beautiful object, thus offering new ways of conceptualising woman's role as the icon of beauty, art and truth.
“An incisive critical work” that looks at Octavia Butler’s writing, the movies of the Matrix and Alien series—and more—through a feminist lens (Femspec). Feminist thinkers and writers are increasingly recognizing science fiction’s potential to shatter patriarchal and heterosexual norms, while the creators of science fiction are bringing new depth and complexity to the genre by engaging with feminist thewories and politics. This book maps the intersection of feminism and science fiction through close readings of science fiction literature by Octavia E. Butler, Richard Calder, and Melissa Scott and the movies The Matrix and the Alien series. Patricia Melzer analyzes how these autho...
This book examines a set of theoretical perspectives that critically engage with the notion of postmodernism, investigating whether this concept is still useful to approach contemporary cinema. This question is explored through a discussion of the films written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, largely regarded as the epitome of postmodern cinema and considered here as theoretical contributions in their own right. Each chapter first presents key ideas proposed by a specific theorist and then puts them in conversation with Tarantino’s films. Jacques Rancière’s theory of art is used to reject postmodernism’s claims about the ‘death’ of the aesthetic image in contemporary cinema. Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Žižek’s dialectical thinking is mobilized to challenge simplistic, ideological readings of postmodern cinema in general, and Tarantino’s films in particular. Finally, the direct influence of Carol Clover’s psychoanalytical approach to the horror genre on Tarantino’s work is discussed to prove the director’s specific contribution to a theoretical understanding of contemporary film aesthetics.