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New Punk Cinema is the first book to examine a new breed of film that is indebted to the punk spirit of experimentation, do-it-yourself ethos, and an uneasy, often defiant relationship with the mainstream. An array of established and emerging scholars trace and map the contours of new punk cinema, from its roots in neorealism and the French New Wave, to its flowering in the work of Lars von Trier and the Dogma 95 movement. Subsequent chapters explore the potentially democratic and even anarchic forces of digital filmmaking, the influences of hypertext and other new media, the increased role of the viewer in arranging and manipulating the chronology of a film, and the role of new punk cinema ...
It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country’s non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing. RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.
Although published many decades ago, William Gaddis's The Recognitions is only now beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves. Carnival of Repetition, the first full-length study of the novel, is a sophisticated analysis that places it in a new literary and cultural context . This novel of the 1950 s is unlike anything else from that decade. It harks back to the works of high modernism (exemplified by Joyce's Ulysses) and looks forward to postmodern fiction (especially as practiced by Barth, Pynchon, and DeLillo). Imitation is its major theme, one that Gaddis pursues on many levels, across several continents, into mazes of arcane knowledge and bogus scholarship, and even into th...
With his complex and unconventional films, Robert Altman often draws an impassioned response from critics but bafflement and indifference from the general public. Some audiences have dismissed his movies as insignificant, unsatisfying, and unreadable. Ironically, Altman might agree: he makes films in order to challenge filmgoers' expectations of straightforward narratives and easily understood endings. In Robert Altman's Subliminal Reality, Robert T. Self sheds light on Altman's work and provides the most comprehensive analysis of his films to date. With close readings of classics like MASH, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville, as well as the more recent films The Player, Short Cuts, and Cookie's Fortune, Self asserts the value of Altman's work not only to film theory and the entertainment industry but to American culture. Book jacket.
Joining the modern-postmodern debate, this book suggests that the polarizing polemics of the radical postmodernists who once dominated the discussion have given way to a new critical postmodernism characterized by dialogue, accommodation, and synthesis. A comprehensive survey, Negotiating Postmodernism also marks the arrival of a powerful, critical presence on the scene, one that advances the idea of a late modern-postmodern social and cultural transition.
In-depth study places a major American writer in the African-American tradition.
The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama offers a fresh and innovative reading of the contemporary experimental American theater scene and navigates through the contested and contentious relationship between postmodernism and contemporary drama. This book addresses gender and class as well as racial issues in the context of a theoretical discussion of dramatic texts, textuality, and performance. Transformation is contemporary drama's answer to the questions of postmodernism and a major technique in the development of a postmodern language for the stage. In order to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of the postmodern theater of transformation, this study draws on a wi...
This book examines the early poetry (1956–1971) of the Ukrainian/American writer Yuriy Tarnawsky, one of the founders of the New York Group of Ukrainian poets and a unique figure among Ukrainian writers with regard to his experiments with forms. Demonstrating the radical changes that occurred in his poetic style between the 1950s and 1970s, Maria Grazia Bartolini analyzes the relationship between these innovations and the similar shifts taking place in Western poetry and culture during the 1950s and 1960s, when new forms of expression and a new consciousness developed in the interstices between modernism and nascent postmodernism. The book provides the reader with a selection of unpublished materials from the Yuriy Tarnawsky Papers at the Bakhmeteff Archive of Columbia University.
A moving and genre-defying text, written after a great loss, that blurs the boundaries between writing and performance
The novels of Paul Auster—finely wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences, and mysteries—have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, Dennis Barone has assembled an international group of scholars who present twelve essays that provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings. The authors explore connections between Auster's poetry and fiction, the philosophical underpinnings of his writing, its relation to detective fiction, and its unique embodiment of the postmodern sublime. Their essays provide the fullest analysis ava...