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The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative investigates the textuality of all discourse, arguing that the ideologically charged distinction between 'journalism' and 'fiction' is socially constructed rather than natural. Phyllis Frus separates literariness from aesthetic definitions, regarding it as a way of reading a text through its style to discover how it 'makes' reality.
American cinema has always been violent, and never more so than now: exploding heads, buses that blow up if they stop, racial attacks, and general mayhem. From slapstick's comic violence to film noir, from silent cinema to Tarantino, violence has been an integral part of America on screen. This new volume in a successful series analyzes violence, examining its nature, its effects, and its cinematic and social meaning.
A collection of critical reviews of some 140 representative South American feature films, encompassing the most important genres and directors of every era, including the silent era, studio films of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and the New Latin American Cinema. Entries organized by country discuss a film's genesis, themes, socio-political context, and major credits, and cite key Spanish-language film reference works. Includes title, director, and name indices, two subject indices, and glossaries of Brazilian and film terms. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In 1937, the first full-length animated film produced by Walt Disney was released. Based on a fairy tale written by the Brothers Grimm, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was an instant success and set the stage for more film adaptations over the next several decades. From animated features like and Bambi to live action films such as Mary Poppins, Disney repeatedly turned to literary sources for inspiration—a tradition the Disney studios continues well into the twenty-first century. In It’s the Disney Version!: Popular Cinema and Literary Classics, Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode have collected essays that consider the relationship between a Disney film and the source material from which it...
This groundbreaking collection reinvigorates the debate over the inclusion of multiethnic literature in the American literary canon. While multiethnic literature has earned a place in the curriculum on many large campuses, it is still a controversial topic at many others, as recent campus and corporate revivals of The Great Books attest. Many still perceive multiethnic literature as being governed by ideological and political issues, perpetuating a false distinction between highbrow "literary" texts and multiethnic works. Through historical overviews and textual analyses, the contributors not only argue for the aesthetic validity of multiethnic literature, but also examine the innovative ways in which multiethnic literature is taught and critiqued. The following questions are also addressed: Who and what determines literary value? What role do scholars, students, the reading public, book awards, and/or publishers play in affirming literary value? Taken together, these essays underscore the necessity for maintaining vibrant conversations about the place of multiethnic literature both inside and outside the academy.
This is the first book to critically examine Hollywood films that focus on male partner violence against women. These films include Gaslight, Sleeping with the Enemy, What’s Love Got to Do with It, Dolores Claiborne, Enough, and Safe Haven. Shaped by the contexts of postfeminism, domestic abuse post-awareness, and familiar genre conventions, these films engage in ideological “gaslighting” that reaffirms our preconceived ideas about men as abusers, women as victims, and the racial and class politics of domestic violence. While the films purport to condemn abuse and empower abused women, this study proposes that they tacitly reinforce the very attitudes that we believe we no longer tolerate. Shoos argues that films like these limit not only popular understanding but also social and institutional interventions.
In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic histor...
The biographical film or biopic is a staple of film production in all major film industries and yet, within film studies, its generic, aesthetic, and cultural significance has remained underexplored. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture fills this gap, conceptualizing the biopic with a particular eye toward the "life" of the genre internationally. New theoretical approaches combine with specially commissioned chapters on contemporary biographical film production in India, Italy, South Korea, France, Russia, Great Britain, and the US, in order to present a selective but well-rounded portrait of the biopic’s place in film culture. From Marie Antoinette to The Social Network, the pieces in this volume critically examine the place of the biopic within ongoing debates about how cinema can and should represent history and "real lives." Contributors discuss the biopic’s grounding in the conventions of the historical film, and explore the genre’s defining traits as well as its potential for innovation. The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture expands the critical boundaries of this evolving, versatile genre.
Creative Writing Practice: reflections on form and process explores the craft of creative writing by illuminating the practices of writers and writer-educators. Demonstrating solutions to problems in different forms and genres, the contributors draw on their professional and personal experiences to examine specific and practical challenges that writers must confront and solve in order to write. This book discusses a range of approaches to writing, such as the early working out of projects, the idea of experimentation, of narrative time, and of failure. With its strong focus on process, Creative Writing Practice is a valuable guide for students, scholars and practitioners of creative writing.
While Stanley Fish has exerted immense influence on the study of seventeenth-century poetry and prose, his most widely read works—and perhaps his most important—are his nonliterary writings. In Justifying Belief, Gary Olson examines Fish's nonliterary work and explains that what unites Fish's interventions in so many seemingly disparate areas of inquiry is his belief in the centrality of rhetoric. Whether he is discussing how disciplines conduct their work, how political positions triumph, or how practice always derives from specific situations despite the grandiose theories employed to justify them, Fish consistently turns to the specific local, contingent context—to the rhetorical si...