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Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (Platform Studies)
by Zabet PattersonHow the S-C 4020—a mainframe peripheral intended to produce scientific visualizations—shaped a series of early computer art projects that emerged from Bell Labs.In 1959, the electronics manufacturer Stromberg-Carlson produced the S-C 4020, a device that allowed mainframe computers to present and preserve images. In the mainframe era, the output of text and image was quite literally peripheral; the S-C 4020—a strange and elaborate apparatus, with a cathode ray screen, a tape deck, a buffer unit, a film camera, and a photo-paper camera—produced most of the computer graphics of the late 1950s and early 1960s. At Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the S-C 4020 became a crucial part of ongoing encounters among art, science, and technology. In this book, Zabet Patterson examines the extraordinary uses to which the Bell Labs SC-2040 was put between 1961 and 1972, exploring a series of early computer art projects shaped by the special computational affordances of the S-C 4020. The S-C 4020 produced tabular data, graph plotting and design drawings, grid projections, and drawings of axes and vectors; it made previously impossible visualizations possible. Among the works Patterson describes are E. E. Zajac's short film of an orbiting satellite, which drew on the machine's graphic capacities as well as the mainframe's calculations; a groundbreaking exhibit of “computer generated pictures” by Béla Julesz and Michael Noll, two scientists interested in visualization; animations by Kenneth Knowlton and the Bell Labs artist-in-residence Stan VanDerBeek; and Lillian Schwartz's “cybernetic” film Pixillation.Arguing for the centrality of a peripheral, Patterson makes a case for considering computational systems not simply as machines but in their cultural and historical context.
Perkasie (Postcard History)
by Ivan J. JurinPerkasie, named after William Penn's country manor in Upper Bucks County, was a boomtown that sprang up along the North Pennsylvania Railroad in the late 1870s. From the 1880s to the 1920s, Perkasie grewrapidly, becoming a transportation and cultural center and drawing crowds with commerce, industry, summer retreats, and even an amusement park. Through nearly 200 vintage postcards, Perkasie chronicles the expansion of this once small town as well as its impact on neighboring rural communities such as Rockhill, Bedminster, and Silverdale. The postcards in this book re-create a visual memory of the economic and social changes that worked to shape this dynamic community.
Perl Graphics Programming: Creating SVG, SWF (Flash), JPEG and PNG files with Perl (O'reilly Ser.)
by Shawn WallaceGraphics programmers aren't the only ones who need to be proficient with graphics. Web and applications programmers know that a dull web page can be quickly transformed into one that's interesting and lively with the use of well-planned graphics. And fortunately, you don't need the skills of a fulltime graphics programmer to use graphics effectively. From access counters and log report graphs to scientific plots and on-the-fly animated GIFs, graphics scripting is within the grasp of most web programmers. Using open source software, like Perl, you have the power to dynamically generate graphics based on user input and activity, easily manipulate graphics content, and optimize graphics for compression and quality.Geared toward Perl users and webmasters, Perl Graphics Programming focuses on open-source scripting programs that manipulate graphics files for use on the Web. The book demystifies the manipulation of graphics formats for newcomers to the Web with a practical, resource-like approach. With this book you'll learn to:Generate dynamic web graphics with charts, tables, and buttonsAutomate graphics tasks (thumbnails and borders)Create dynamics web documents (PDF, Postscript)Produce rich Internet experiences with Flash and SVGYou'll begin with a tour of the most common web graphic file formats--PNG, JPEG, GIF, SWF, SVG, Postscript and PDF--then you'll explore the most powerful tools and Perl modules available for manipulating these graphics, such as GD, PerlMagick, and GIMP. Included in this part of the book is a thorough description of the Ming module for creating on-the-fly Flash files. Next, a "cookbook" section includes practical, all purpose recipes: GIF animation, generating images within a dynamic application, communicating between SWF front-end and Perl back-end, XSLT transformations, compression, and much more.Perl programmers naturally turn to Perl to tackle whatever challenge they have at hand, and graphics programming is no exception. Perl Graphics Programming provides all the tools you need to begin programming and designing graphics for the Web immediately. This book will change how you think about generating and manipulating graphics for the Web.
Perle Di Saggezza
by A. N. Okonobohparole di saggezza, detti saggi, vecchi detti, filosofia dei saggi e cultura antica. questo è quello che troverete nel libro. quest'ultimo è diverso dalla solita raccolta di proverbi che si trova nelle opere di saggezza orientali. La gamma antologica qui è ampia, in modo da ospitare detti per donne e uomini, bambini e genitori, salmi nuziali, piante e animali, realtà e astratto, essenziale e banalità e sposa e sposo. L'Africa faraonica culla della civiltà e i continenti intelligenti del mito e della leggenda sono evidenziati con colori culturali. E l'opera scosta la cortina di questi gioielli tradizionali tramandati oralmente, andando così come missionari nella terra delle culture straniere. Come lettore, vedrai meglio nel libro, dipinto in vividi quadri di parole, l'identità africana e l'arte della storia che è spesso presente in abiti, piumini, cuscini, placche, orecchini, braccialetti, collane e regali, insieme a divertenti citazioni e ritmi. I proverbi e gli indovinelli sono una parte importante della vita tradizionale africana. Cercano di far emergere una serie di consigli ponderati, comprensione, verità, morali e avvertimenti sia in modo serio che umoristico. Evocano significati dalle esperienze quotidiane, mostrano l'unità della comunità e si collegano alla spiritualità biblica. La bellezza di questa raccolta è la generosa latitudine verso molti possibili significati, dato che non viene fatto alcun tentativo di suggerirne uno. Se non diversamente indicato, tutti i proverbi qui sono accreditati agli Ishans, una piccola tribù minoritaria di Edo, Nigeria. Tuttavia, la maggior parte sono conosciuti in altre tribù e i loro messaggi sono veri per la gente di tutto il mondo. Questo libro guadagnerà pubblico tra le famiglie e i lettori che cercano di trovare la saggezza delle parole. Scoprite quindi perché" La stanza di un bambino piccolo non è sufficiente per una mascherata per travestirsi". E perché "Un uomo d
The Permaculture City
by Toby HemenwayPermaculture is more than just the latest buzzword; it offers positive solutions for many of the environmental and social challenges confronting us. And nowhere are those remedies more needed and desired than in our cities. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that works so beautifully for growing food--connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways--applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design, illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs. The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we're not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways. Readers will find new information on designing the urban home garden and strategies for gardening in community, rethinking our water and energy systems, learning the difference between a "job" and a "livelihood," and the importance of placemaking and an empowered community. This important book documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practitioners. Understanding nature can do more than improve how we grow, make, or consume things; it can also teach us how to cooperate, make decisions, and arrive at good solutions.
The Permaculture Promise: What Permaculture Is and How It Can Help Us Reverse Climate Change, Build a More Resilient Future on Earth, and Revitalize Our Communities
by Toby Hemenway Jono NeigerPermaculture is a sustainability buzzword, but many people wonder what it actually means and why it is relevant. Originally coined by combining the words permanent and agriculture, permaculture has evolved into an optimistic approach connecting all the systems of human life: gardening, housing, transportation, energy, and how we structure our communities. The Permaculture Promise explains in simple terms why permaculture may be the key to unlocking a livable future on our planet. Author Jono Neiger asserts that humans can thrive while simultaneously making Earth healthier and not destroying it. The book shows 22 ways that permaculture can create a better future for all living things. Profiles of people and communities — including an urban dweller who tore up her driveway to create a vegetable garden and a California housing development that dedicates a third of its land to parks, orchards, and gardens — will inspire you to incorporate permaculture principles into your life today.
Permutation Design: Buildings, Texts, and Contexts
by Kostas TerzidisIn design, the problems that designers are called upon to solve can be regarded as a problem of permutations. A permutation is an ordered arrangement of elements in a set. In our case, the set is design and the elements are design components, such as lines, shapes, forms, or spaces. Traditionally, such arrangements are done by human designers who base their decision-making process either on intuition or on random sampling until a valid solution is found. However, in both cases the solution found may be an acceptable one but cannot be labeled as "the best possible solution" due to the subjective or arbitrary nature of the selection process. In contrast, by harnessing the potential of computational design, these elements can be arranged in all possible ways and then the best ones are chosen based on specific criteria. By presenting a complete list of permutation-based arrangements the "best solution" will eventually reveal itself by excluding all other possible solutions. This book comprehensively addresses theories, techniques, and examples of permutation design in order to fully demonstrate to the reader the full range of possibilities this method represents. The significance of such an approach to design is enormous, paradigmatic, and far-reaching. It provides an alternative method for design analysis, synthesis, and evaluation that is based on computational force rather than pure human intelligence alone. In contrast to human-based random sampling or intuition, permutation-based design offers the assurance of an optimum design since any possible alternative design can be eliminated. From a practical point of view, this methodology offers a paradigmatic shift away from the current state of design practice where arbitrariness, repetition, and redundancy often exist. From a theoretical viewpoint, this new paradigm will offer alternative insights into the value of human creativity, intuition, and intelligence.
Perpetrating Selves: Doing Violence, Performing Identity
by Clare Bielby Jeffrey Stevenson MurerThis volume explores violent perpetration in diverse forms from an interdisciplinary and transnational perspective. From National Socialist perpetration in the museum, through post-terrorist life writing to embodied performances of perpetration in cosplay, the collection draws upon a series of historical and geographical case studies, seen through the lens of a variety of texts, with a particular focus on the locus of the museum as a technology of sense making. In addition to its authored chapters, the volume includes three contributed interviews which offer a practice-led perspective on the topic. Through its wide-ranging approach to violence, the volume draws attention to the contested and gendered nature of what is constructed as ‘perpetration’. With a focus on perpetrator subjectivity or the ‘perpetrator self’, it proposes that we approach perpetration as a form of ‘doing’; and a ‘doing’ that is bound up with the ‘doing’ of one’s gendered identity more broadly. The work will be of great interest to students and scholars working on violence and perpetration in the fields of History, Literary Studies, Area Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Museum Studies, Cultural Studies, International Relations and Political Science.
Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary (Nonfictions)
by Raya MoragPerpetrator Cinema explores a new trend in the cinematic depiction of genocide that has emerged in Cambodian documentary in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries. While past films documenting the Holocaust and genocides in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and elsewhere have focused on collecting and foregrounding the testimony of survivors and victims, the intimate horror of the autogenocide enables post–Khmer Rouge Cambodian documentarians to propose a direct confrontation between the first-generation survivor and the perpetrator of genocide. These films break with Western tradition and disrupt the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to atrocities of the past. Rather, transcending the perpetrator’s typical denial or partial confession, this extraordinary form of “duel” documentary creates confrontational tension and opens up the possibility of a transformation in power relations, allowing viewers to access feelings of moral resentment.Raya Morag examines works by Rithy Panh, Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, and Lida Chan and Guillaume Suon, among others, to uncover the ways in which filmmakers endeavor to allow the survivors’ moral status and courage to guide viewers to a new, more complete understanding of the processes of coming to terms with the past. These documentaries show how moral resentment becomes a way to experience, symbolize, judge, and finally incorporate evil into a system of ethics. Morag’s analysis reveals how perpetrator cinema provides new epistemic tools and propels the recent social-cultural-psychological shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator.
Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (Electronic Mediations #59)
by Harmony BenchA new exploration of how digital media assert the relevance of dance in a wired world How has the Internet changed dance? Dance performances can now be seen anywhere, can be looped endlessly at user whim, and can integrate crowds in unprecedented ways. Dance practices are evolving to explore these new possibilities. In Perpetual Motion, Harmony Bench argues that dance is a vital part of civil society and a means for building participation and community. She looks at how, after 9/11, it became a crucial way of recuperating the common character of public spaces. She explores how crowdsourcing dance contributes to the project of performing a common world, as well as the social relationships forged when we look at dance as a gift in the era of globalization. Throughout, she asks how dance brings people together in digital spaces and what dance&’s digital travels might mean for how we experience and express community. From original research on dance today to political economies of digital media to the philosophy of dance, Perpetual Motion provides an ambitious, invigorating look at a commonly shared practice.
Perpetual Movement: Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema)
by Neil BadmingtonThe first book-length study in English of Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Perpetual Movement offers both a production history that draws extensively upon little-known archival materials, including set drawings and drafts of the screenplay, and a close examination of the film in which Neil Badmington analyzes each of Rope's eleven shots. Writing in an accessible and engaging style, Badmington explores the film's treatment of space, sound, editing, sexuality, source material, design, intertexuality, narrative, and music. He looks at Hitchcock's struggle with censorship while planning, shooting, and distributing the film. Perpetual Movement also addresses Rope's reception and legacy, explaining why the film's unusual qualities provide such lasting appeal for viewers.
Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (Film and Culture Series)
by David BordwellNarrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.
Perris Valley (Images of America)
by Perris Valley Historical & Museum AssociationThe brave pioneers who arrived throughout the late 1800s in covered wagons or on trains to the desolate San Jacinto Plains, as it was called at that time, saw beauty in the picturesque mountain ranges and blue skies and were beholden to their new home in what was to become the Perris Valley. Ready to start their new lives, many came for the health benefits provided by the dry climate. The Perris Valley has come a long way from its rural farming roots. It is now highly diversified and urbanized. Several exciting venues are part of Perris Valley today, including the Orange Empire Railway Museum, which is the largest rail museum in the western United States, and the internationally renowned Skydive Perris.
Perry County
by Eleanor C. DrakePerry County has been a major player in the history of Alabama. Native Americans lived and hunted on its land, and it became a county before Alabama gained statehood. Early citizens chose to name it for Oliver Hazard Perry, a hero of the War of 1812. The people of Perry County have played major roles over the years, which include the following: one married Sam Houston; one served as Alabama's first governor during the Civil War; one designed the Confederate flag and uniform; one married Martin Luther King; one was slain by a state trooper, triggering the Selma-to-Montgomery march; and another was the wife of Andrew Young. Along with its history, Perry County is an educational center and the location of many homes that predate the Civil War. Images of America: Perry County features samples of its rich history in photographs.
Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp: A History of Art in Nature (Landmarks)
by Dagny McKinleyIn 1914, Charlotte Perry and Portia Mansfield envisioned a secluded institution nestled in the mountains, where art and nature could intersect. By the 1920s, their remote Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School & Camp in Steamboat Springs was serving as a hub for top dancers such as José Limon and Harriette Ann Gray to hone their craft. In addition to training thousands of pointed toes and arched feet, the school showcased equestrian jumping and performed plays by masters, including Shakespeare, García Lorca and Tennessee Williams. The theater program eventually attracted budding actors like Julie Harris, Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Biel. Author Dagny McKinley presents the story of America's longest continuously running performing arts camp.
Perry Mason: Perry Mason
by Thomas LeitchAn exploration of the enduring popularity of the television series Perry Mason and its universal reputation as the most formulaic program in the history of broadcast television.
Perrysburg: Historic Architecture
by C. Robert BoydCongress created Perrysburg in 1816 to secure control of its strategic trading location on the largest river flowing into Lake Erie, the Maumee River, an integral waterway for shipping and also an important passageway for western migration. As a busy port and shipbuilding center, Perrysburg attracted entrepreneurial pioneers from the East, who, as they prospered, built remarkable homes, buildings, and other structures. During the World War I era, wealthy Toledo industrialists also arrived, building riverside mansions. Over 100 of this small 19th-century community's architectural treasures still stand, and they include examples of nearly every major domestic architectural style popular from the 1820s to the 1930s. Most of the structures that make up the historical character of Perrysburg are best represented in the Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Persia in Early Modern English Drama, 1530–1699: The Imagined Empire (New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800)
by Chloë HoustonThis book is a study of the representation of the Persian empire in English drama across the early modern period, from the 1530s to the 1690s. The wide focus of this book, encompassing thirteen dramatic entertainments, both canonical and little-known, allow it to trace the changes and developments in the dramatic use of Persia and its people across one and a half centuries. It explores what Persia signified to English playwrights and audiences in this period; the ideas and associations conjured up by mention of ‘Persia’; and where information about Persia came from. It also considers how ideas about Persia changed with the development of global travel and trade, as English people came into people with Persians for the first time. In addressing these issues, this book provides an examination not only of the representation of Persia in dramatic material, but of the broader relationship between travel, politics and the theatre in early modern England.
Persian Calligraphy: A Corpus Study of Letterforms (Iranian Studies)
by Mahdiyeh MeidaniThis book is an exploratory adventure to defamiliarize calligraphy, especially Persian Nastaliq calligraphic letterforms, and to look beyond the tradition that has always considered calligraphy as pursuant to and subordinate to linguistic practices. Calligraphy can be considered a visual communicative system with different means of meaning-making or as a medium through which meaning is made and expression is conveyed via a complex grammar. This study looks at calligraphy as a systematic means in the field of visual communication, rather than as a one-dimensional and ad hoc means of providing visual beauty and aesthetic enjoyment. Revolving around different insights of multimodal social semiotics, the volume relies on the findings of a corpus study of Persian Nastaliq calligraphy. The research emphasizes the way in which letterforms, regardless of conventions in language, are applied as graphically meaningful forms that convey individual distinct meanings. This volume on Persian Nastaliq calligraphy will be inspirational to visual artists, designers, calligraphers, writers, linguists, and visual communicators. With an introduction to social semiotics, this work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in visual arts, media and communication, and semiotics.
Persian Carpets: The Nation as a Transnational Commodity (Routledge Series for Creative Teaching and Learning in Anthropology)
by Minoo MoallemPersian Carpets: the Nation As a Transnational Commodity tracks the Persian carpet as an exotic and mythological object, as a commodity, and as an image from mid-nineteenth-century England to contemporary Iran and the Iranian diaspora. Following the journey of this single object, the book brings issues of labor into conversation with the politics of aesthetics. It focuses on the carpet as a commodity which crosses the boundaries of private and public, religious and secular, culture and economy, modern and traditional, home and diaspora, and art and commodity to tell the story of transnational interconnectivity. Bringing transnational feminist cultural studies, ethnography, and network studies within the same frame of reference, this book sheds light on Orientalia as civilizational objects that emerged as commodities in the encounter between the West and the many directly or indirectly colonized Middle Eastern and West Asian cultures, focusing on the specific example of Persian carpets as some of the most extensively valued and traded objects since colonial modernity.
Persian Designs and Motifs for Artists and Craftsmen (Dover Pictorial Archive)
by Ali DowlatshahiOver the centuries, Persia (Iran) has borne the brunt of periodic invasions. Elements of these foreign cultures, including Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Mongolian, and European influences, were incorporated into the native artistic tradition but transmuted by Persian artists into a highly original and uniquely Iranian style. This outstanding collection of motifs comprises over 400 examples of this rich tradition, ready for use in a multitude of design areas.Ranging from prehistoric pottery painting to 20th-century calligraphy, this volume spans the full spectrum of Iranian art, including the Achaemenian, Parthian, Sassanian, and Safavid eras. Included are designs drawn from textiles (weaves, printed fabrics, embroidery, carpets), ceramics (pottery and tile), carved and incised work (stucco, stone, metal), miscellaneous ornament, book illustration, and calligraphy.The author, a native Iranian and well-known artist, has carefully rendered designs from original masterpieces in public and private collections around the world. The motifs include floral patterns, geometrics, arabesques, mythical creatures, rosettes, paisley patterns, palmettes, medallions, border and marginal decorations, scrolls, curves, and hunting scenes.Embodying the sumptuous detail, rich texture, and elaborate ornamentation that constitute the glory of Persian art, these motifs also exemplify the Iranian artist's traditional devotion to symmetry, harmonious pattern, and purity of line and form.
The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture
by Talinn GrigorOne of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran.The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste.An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.
The Persian Revival: The Imperialism of the Copy in Iranian and Parsi Architecture
by Talinn GrigorOne of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran.The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste.An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.
The Persistence of Hollywood
by Thomas ElsaesserWhile Hollywood’s success – its persistence – has remained constant for almost one hundred years, the study of its success has undergone significant expansion and transformation. Since the 1960s, Thomas Elsaesser’s research has spearheaded the study of Hollywood, beginning with his classic essays on auteurism and cinephilia, focused around a director’s themes and style, up to his analysis of the "corporate authorship" of contemporary director James Cameron. In between, he has helped to transform film studies by incorporating questions of narrative, genre, desire, ideology and, more recently, Hollywood’s economic-technological infrastructure and its place within global capitalism. The Persistence of Hollywood brings together Elsaesser’s key writings about Hollywood filmmaking. It includes his detailed studies of individual directors (including Minnelli, Fuller, Ray, Hitchcock, Lang, Altman, Kubrick, Coppola, and Cameron), as well as essays charting the shifts from classic to corporate Hollywood by way of the New Hollywood and the resurgence of the blockbuster. The book also presents a history of the different critical-theoretical paradigms central to film studies in its analysis of Hollywood, from auteurism and cinephilia to textual analysis, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-industrial analysis.