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In America on Film, first published in 2002, Sam Girgus examines a selection of films made in the last quarter of the twentieth century in an effort to trace how the notion of 'American' has changed drastically from that portrayed in American cinema up to the 1950s. In works such as Mississippi Masala, Lone Star, Malcolm X, Raging Bull, When We Were Kings, and Bugsy he finds a new and ethnically varied array of characters that embody American values, ideals, and conflicts; and a transformation in the relationship of American identity and culture to race and ethnicity, as well as to sexuality, gender, and the body. America on Film charts these changes through analysis of cinematic tensions between fiction, documentary, and modernism. An art form that combines fragments of reality with imagination, film, Girgus maintains, connects the documentary realism of the photographic image to the abstraction and non-representation of modernism.
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A young Hasidic Jew seeks his fortune in New York's Lower East Side. He turns from his religious studies to focus on the business world, where he discovers the high price of assimilation.
The clearest, boldest and most systematic statement of Simon Critchley’s influential views on philosophy, ethics, and politics, Infinitely Demanding identifies a massive political disappointment at the heart of liberal democracy. Arguing that what is called for is an ethics of commitment that can inform a radical politics, Critchley considers the possibility of political subjectivity and action after Marx and Marxism, taking in the work of Kant, Levinas, Badiou and Lacan. Infinitely Demanding culminates in an argument for anarchism as an ethical practice and a remotivating means of political organization.
"Street provides a crucial critical and cultural service by not only studying Eastwood's individual films in sharp detail but also by providing a close and serious analysis of the cultural and historic times of the films."--Sam B. Girgus, author of Clint Eastwood's America "By far the most comprehensive, sustained, and detailed discussion of the Dirty Harry phenomenon. A thorough and engaging account of how a fictitious renegade cop became an enduring icon of the angry conservative backlash that sought to halt 1960s liberalism in its tracks."--Nick Heffernan, author of Culture, Environment and Ecopolitics Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry became the prototype for a new kind of movie cop--an antih...
The Law of the Heart is a vigorous challenge to the prevailing concept of the “antidemocratic” image of the self in the American literary and cultural tradition. Sam B. Girgus counters this interpretation and attempts to develop a new understanding of democratic individualism and liberal humanism in American literature under the rubric of literary modernism. The image of the individual self who retreats inward, conforming to a distorted “law of the heart,” emerges from the works of such writers as Cooper and Poe and composer Charles Ives. Yet, as Girgus shows, other American writers relate the idea of the self to reality and culture in a more complex way: the self confronts and is reconciled to the paradox of history and reality. In Girgus’ view, the tradition of pragmatic, humanistic individualism provides a foundation for a future where individual liberty is a major priority. He uses literary modernism as a bridge for relating contemporary social conditions to crises of the American self and culture as seen in the works of writers including Emerson, Howells, Whitman, Henry James, William James, Fitzgerald, Bellow, and McLuhan.
Cinema and Language Loss provides the first sustained exploration of the relationship between linguistic displacement and visuality in the filmic realm, examining in depth both its formal expressions and theoretical implications. In tracing the encounter between cinema and language loss across a wide range of films - from Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard to Chantal Akerman's News from Home to Michael Haneke's Caché - Mamula reevaluates the role of displacement in postwar Western film and makes an original contribution to film theory and philosophy based on a reconsideration of the place of language in our experience and understanding of cinema.
This early work by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was originally published in 1935. It is the autobiography of the American sociologist, novelist and poet who is best remembered for her semi-autobiographical short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'.
Over a career that has spanned more than six decades, Woody Allen has explored the emotion of regret as a response to the existentialist dilemma of not being someone else. Tracing this recurrent theme from his stand-up comedy routines and apprentice work through classics like Annie Hall, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Bullets Over Broadway as well as less esteemed accomplishments (Another Woman, Sweet and Lowdown, Cassandra's Dream), this volume argues that it is ultimately the shallowness of his protagonists' regret—their lack of deeply felt, sustained remorse—that defines Allen's pervasive view of human experience. Drawing on insights from philosophy, ...