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Taking as his starting point fifteen characteristically penetrating epigrams by Jean-Luc Godard, Richard Dienst invites us to trace a new path through some of the fundamental questions of cinema. Godard has never stopped offering lessons about seeing and thinking, always insisting that we have to learn how to start over. By starting over "from scratch," Godard challenges us to rethink our ideas about embodied perception, material form and the politics of making images. Less a commentary on Godard's oeuvre than an outline of a Godardian pedagogy, Seeing from Scratch offers a theoretical exercise book for students, teachers and practitioners alike, pursuing unexpectedly far-reaching ways to th...
Television can be imagined in a number of ways: as a profuse flow of images, as a machine that produces new social relationships, as the last lingering gasp of Western metaphysical thinking, as a stuttering relay system of almost anonymous messages, as a fantastic construction of time. Richard Dienst engages each of these possibilities as he explores the challenge television has posed for contemporary theories of culture, technology, and media. Five theoretical projects provide Still Life in Real Time with its framework: the cultural studies tradition of Raymond Williams; Marxist political economy; Heideggerian existentialism; Derridean deconstruction; and a Deleuzian anatomy of images. Draw...
Indebtedness as the universal condition of modern life The credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In this timely book, cultural critic Richard Dienst considers the financial crisis, global poverty, media politics and radical theory to parse the various implications of a world where man is born free but everywhere is in debt. Written with humor and verve, Bonds of Debt ranges across subjects—such as Obama’s national security strategy, the architecture of Prada stores, press photos of Bono, and a fairy tale told by Karl Marx—to capture a modern condition founded on fiscal imprudence. Moving beyond the dominant pieties and widespread anxieties surrounding the topic, Dienst re-conceives the world’s massive financial obligations as a social, economic, and political bond, where the crushing weight of objectified wealth comes face to face with new demands for equality and solidarity. For this inspired analysis, we are indebted to him.
With a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary approach to German political and social theory, Confronting Mass Democracy and Industrial Technology provides fresh insight into the thought of many of the most influential intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Its essays detail the manner in which a wide range of German intellectuals grappled with the ramifications and implications of democracy, technology, knowledge, and control from the late Kaisserreich to the Weimar Republic, from the Third Reich and the Federal Republic through recently unified Germany. Scholars representing the fields of political science, philosophy, history, law, literature, and cultural studies devote essays to the ...
A history and social psychology of punk music.
Moving world-systems analysis into the cultural realm, Richard E. Lee locates the cultural studies movement within a broad historical and geopolitical framework. He illuminates how order and conflict have been reflected and negotiated in the sphere of knowledge production by situating the emergence of cultural studies at the intersection of post–1945 international and British politics and a two-hundred-year history of conservative critical practice. Tracing British criticism from the period of the French Revolution through the 1960s, he describes how cultural studies in its infancy recombined the elite literary critical tradition with the First New Left’s concerns for history and popular...
The term culture in its anthropological sense did not enter the American lexicon with force until after 1910—more than a century after Herder began to use it in Germany and another thirty years after E. B. Tylor and Franz Boas made it the object of anthropological attention. Before Cultures explores this delay in the development of the culture concept and its relation to the description of difference in late nineteenth-century America. In this work, Brad Evans weaves together the histories of American literature and anthropology. His study brings alive not only the regionalist and ethnographic fiction of the time but also revives a range of neglected materials, including the Zuni sketchboo...
With the weakening moral authority of the Catholic Church, the boom ushered in by the Celtic Tiger, and the slow but steady diminishment of the Troubles in the North, Ireland has finally stepped out from the shadows of colonial oppression onto the world stage as a major cosmopolitan country. Taking its title from a veiled reference to Roger Casement-the humanitarian and Irish patriot hanged for treason-in James Joyce's Ulysses, The Poor Bugger's Tool demonstrates how the affective labor of Irish queer culture might contribute to a progressive new national image for the Republic and Northern Ireland.Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Wilde, Synge, Casement, and ...
This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock considers Hitchcock both in his time and as a continuing influence on filmmakers, films and film theory. The contributions, who include leading scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and James Naremore, discuss canonical films such as Notorious and The Birds alongside lesser-known works including Juno and the Paycock and Frenzy. Articles are grouped into four thematic sections: 'Authorship and Aesthetics' examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. 'French Hitchcock' looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. 'Poetics and Politics of Identity' explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work. The final section, 'Death and Transfiguration' addresses the manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece Psycho.