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Gonda, a new book by Ursula Mayer and Maria Fusco, experiments in cinematic and linguistic registers through polyphonic monologue. Taking the form of a ciné-roman, the book is based on Mayer's 16mm film of the same name, with a screenplay written by Maria Fusco and commissioned by Film London. Gonda is informed by Ayn Rand's 1934 play Ideal. In the play's script, controversial Russian American writer and philosopher Rand lays out her philosophical system of "Objectivism" with its stubbornly anti-altruistic and individualistic position. As a critical counter to Rand, Gonda creates kaleidoscopic printed spaces in which image and text shift roles to affect presupposed ideals of identity and ex...
This Zarma > English lexicon is based on the 200+ language 8,000 entry World Languages Dictionary CD of 2007 which was subsequently lodged in national libraries across the world. The corresponding Chinese lexicon has a vocabulary of 2,429 characters, 95% of which are in the primary group of 3,500 general standard Chinese characters issued by China's Ministry of Education in 2013.
"A sumptuously documented book, one that makes innovative use of the principle of montage to generate informative historical readings of Japan's myriad mass cultural phenomena in the early twentieth century. Both in terms of its scholarship and its methodology, this is a truly admirable work."—Rey Chow, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, Brown University "As Miriam Silverberg has brilliantly shown here, the modern times of 1920s and ‘30s Japan were rendered in a cacophony of cultural mixing: a period of consumerist desires and Hollywood fantasy-making but also the rise of nationalist empire-building. Excavating its kaleidoscope of everyday culture Silverberg astutely offers a ...
Mayfield Bunny, the new novel by Herbert Feldman, author of Broken Record, is the story of an obsessional search, architected in fantasy and self-delusion. The novels protagonist, Dr. Egon Chernel, has dedicated his unruly, anarchic life to the elimination of human blindness on Planet Earth: Chernels astonishing scientific miracle, source of a certain Nobel Prize, depends upon his uncovering and interviewing Mayfield Bunny, a being of unknown species and image. Chernel gathers a small band of followers, needy individuals, in search of their own slot in society, around him. Chernel, chosen as savior of the sightless, tyrannically drives his disciples through his fanatical, lunatic hunt for his Holy Grail, Mayfield Bunny. Mayfield Bunny is absurd, surreal, but the book is, ultimately, a tragic rendering of the lethal price one pays for a life lived in fantasy and uncompromising delusion. You wont easily forget Egon Chernel and his acolytes in their quest for the mystery and essence of Mayfield Bunny.
In this study, Aaron Gerow focuses on the early period in which the institutional and narrational structure of Japanese cinema was in flux, arguing that the transnational intertext is less important than the power-laden operations by which the meaning of cinema itself was discursively defined. Both progressive critics of the 'pure film' movement and the more conservative Japanese cultural bureaucrats demanded a unitary text that suppressed the hybrid and unpredictable meanings attendant on early Japanese cinema's informal exhibition contexts. Gerow points out the irony that the progressive and individualist pure film movement critics worked in concert with the Japanese state to undo the 'theft' of Japanese cinema, proposing to replace representations of Japan in Western films by exporting a Japanese cinema 'reformed' to emulate the international norm.
Vasileios Balaskas explores the revival of classical drama at ancient venues as a sociopolitical apparatus of the European nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The modern use of Graeco-Roman theatres, odeons, amphitheatres, and stadiums depended on social or artistic influences and interconnections. In particular, the Spanish and Greek cases developed in parallel and addressed similar sociopolitical concepts, while the Italian example served as a model for their theatrical tradition in the first decades of the twentieth century. In theatrical terms, this book argues that the repertoire and orientation of classical drama were influenced by (inter)national artistic trends, ...
Dialectics without Synthesis explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized participation in the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the twentieth century. Examining a variety of Japanese theorists working in the fields of film, literature, avant-garde art, Marxism, and philosophy, Naoki Yamamoto offers a new approach to cinematic realism as culturally conditioned articulations of the shifting relationship of film to the experience of modernity. In this study, long-held oppositions between realism and modernism, universalism and particularism, and most notably, the West and the non-West are challenged through a radical reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production and consumption.