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Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era
by Katherine BiersIn Virtual Modernism, Katherine Biers offers a fresh view of the emergence of American literary modernism from the eruption of popular culture in the early twentieth century. Employing dynamic readings of the works of Stephen Crane, Henry James, James Weldon Johnson, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, she argues that American modernist writers developed a &“poetics of the virtual&” in response to the rise of mass communications technologies before World War I. These authors&’ modernist formal experimentation was provoked by the immediate, individualistic pleasures and thrills of mass culture. But they also retained a faith in the representational power of language—and the worth of common experience—more characteristic of realism and naturalism. In competition with new media experiences such as movies and recorded music, they simultaneously rejected and embraced modernity.Biers establishes the virtual poetics of these five writers as part of a larger &“virtual turn&” in the United States, when a fascination with the writings of Henri Bergson, William James, and vitalist philosophy—and the idea of virtual experience—swept the nation. Virtual Modernism contends that a turn to the virtual experience of language was a way for each of these authors to carve out a value for the literary, both with and against the growth of mass entertainments. This technologically inspired reengagement with experience was formative for American modernism.Situated at the crossing points of literary criticism, philosophy, media studies, and history, Virtual Modernism provides an examination of Progressive Era preoccupations with the cognitive and corporeal effects of new media technologies that traces an important genealogy of present-day concerns with virtuality.
Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture
by Edward KingThis book discusses representations of Japanese culture in Brazil, which emerge both in relation to the history of Japanese immigration to the country and to the increasingly global interest in manga and anime. These orientalist texts hesitate between contrasting conceptions of identity. They express both a nostalgia for the imagined stabilities of national modes of identification and a desire to challenge dominant conceptions of race and national belonging through an exploration of the virtualities of time and space opened up by information technologies. Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture analyzes this contradictory discourse and provides a crucial insight into changing conceptions of modernity in Brazil.
Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture #127)
by Timothy GaoPondering the town he had invented in his novels, Anthony Trollope had 'so realised the place, and the people, and the facts' of Barset that 'the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps'. After his novels end, William Thackeray wonders where his characters now live, and misses their conversation. How can we understand the novel as a form of artificial reality? Timothy Gao proposes a history of virtual realities, stemming from the imaginary worlds created by novelists like Trollope, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. Departing from established historical or didactic understandings of Victorian fiction, Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel recovers the period's fascination with imagined places, people, and facts. This text provides a short history of virtual experiences in literature, four studies of major novelists, and an innovative approach for scholars and students to interpret realist fictions and fictional realities from before the digital age. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Virtual Presenting: A Guide to Formats, Production and Authentic Delivery
by Jamie Cohen Michael SorrentinoResponding to the widespread and continued acceleration of virtual working practices in recent years, Virtual Presenting provides a clear guide to producing, presenting, and broadcasting in a remote context. Unlike traditional studio production where a presenter is surrounded by a crew and cameras, the virtual presenter is often isolated or connected to a remote crew. Virtual Presenting explains how to make an authentic connection across great spaces, linked only via the Internet. Topics covered include how to build a virtual setup; how to appear on camera; how to appear confident and comfortable; and how to optimize your presentation voice. The authors demonstrate how to tell effective stories across the entire new media landscape of webcasting, webinars, livestreams, and virtual events. Finally, success stories and case studies from teachers, students, and professionals are interwoven to show how these guidelines translate into best practices. Virtual Presenting will be a valuable resource for students of media production and remote broadcasting as well as professionals looking to become stronger communicators and visual presenters.
Virtual Reality Narratives: Embodied Encounters in Space
by Kath DooleyThis monograph delves into recent evolutions in virtual reality (VR) storytelling, focusing on entertainment-based works created or launched since 2020. Through various case studies, it showcases the increasing diversity and sophistication of recent narrative-based projects. Moving past the initial hype associated with the latest wave of VR, a number of innovative and affective works combining documentary-based or fictional storytelling with game mechanics, live theatre and other elements, have appeared at festivals or on distribution platforms in recent years. These interdisciplinary works have much to tell us about the future of VR storytelling but have yet to receive sustained analysis. This book aims to correct that. Dooley argues that VR, as an interactive medium that places the user inside a storyworld in a visible or invisible virtual body, offers narratives that incorporate the user’s body as a storytelling tool. This fosters user-centred stories that unfold in three-dimensional space. Adopting phenomenological and formal analysis methodologies, the monograph examines case studies through their approaches to narrative, style, and interactive devices. Key concepts that are explored include agency, direct address, environmental and spatial storytelling, embodiment and presence. By providing a much-needed analysis of works through a variety of theoretical lenses, the book illustrates how recent VR storytelling fosters powerfully transformative experiences.
Virtual Sites as Learning Spaces: Critical Issues on Languaging Research in Changing Eduscapes
by Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta Giulia Messina Dahlberg Ylva LindbergThis volume fills a gap in the literature between the domains of Communication Studies and Educational Sciences across physical-virtual spaces as they intersect in the 21st century. The chapters focus on “languaging” - communicative practices in the making - and its intersection with analogue and virtual learning spaces, bringing together studies that highlight the constant movement between analogue-virtual dimensions that continuously re-shape participants' identity positionings. Languaging is understood as the deployment of one or more than one language variety, modality, embodiment, etc in human meaning-making across spaces. Languaging activities are explored through a multitude of literary artefacts, genres, media, and modes produced in and across sites. The authors go beyond “best practice” approaches and instead present “how-to-explore” communicative practices for researchers, learners and teachers. This book will be of interest to readers situated in the areas of literacy, literature, bi/multilingualism, multimodality, linguistic anthropology, applied linguistics, and related fields. Chapters 2, 5, 8 and 12 are open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology
by Jonathon KeatsThe technological realm provides an unusually active laboratory not only for new ideas and products but also for the remarkable linguistic innovations that accompany and describe them. How else would words like qubit(a unit of quantum information), crowdsourcing (outsourcing to the masses), orin vitro meat (chicken and beef grown in an industrial vat) enter our language? In Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology, Jonathon Keats, author of Wired Magazine's monthly Jargon Watch column, investigates the interplay between words and ideas in our fast-paced tech-driven use-it-or-lose-it society. In 28 illuminating short essays, Keats examines how such words get coined, what relationship they have to their subject matter, and why some, like blog, succeed while others, like flog, fail. Divided into broad categories--such as commentary, promotion, and slang, in addition to scientific and technological neologisms--chapters each consider one exemplary word, its definition, origin, context, and significance. Examples range from microbiome(the collective genome of all microbes hosted by the human body) and unparticle(a form of matter lacking definite mass) to gene foundry (a laboratory where artificial life forms are assembled) and singularity (a hypothetical future moment when technology transforms the whole universe into a sentient supercomputer). Together these words provide not only a survey of technological invention and its consequences, but also a fascinating glimpse of novel language as it comes into being. No one knows this emerging lexical terrain better than Jonathon Keats. In writing that is as inventive and engaging as the language it describes, Virtual Words offers endless delights for word-lovers, technophiles, and anyone intrigued by the essential human obsession with naming.
Virtual Worlds and Criminality
by Dieter Hermann Kai Cornelius, LL.M.The fusion between virtuality and reality has created a new quality of experience establishing metaverses and virtual worlds. Second Life, Twinity, Entropia Universe or Fregger have experienced rapid growth in recent years and show no signs of slowing down. Not only have countless companies discovered these "virtureal worlds" as marketplaces, but so have fraudsters and other criminals. In this book, European experts from different academic disciplines show how to meet the new challenges arising from virtual worlds. They discuss the reasons for and the impacts of these new forms of criminality as well as the necessity and means of combating them. Moreover, other fundamental issues are examined, such as the addictive potential of virtual-world use, media violence, and conflict resolution problems arising in the context of virtual worlds.
Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal
by David Dowker Christine StewartVirtualis: Topologies of the Unreal is a poetic investigation of melancholia and the baroque. As a collaborative reading of writers such as Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, David Dowker and Christine Stewart have created a series of linguistic interjections that run from the allegorical barricades of the baroque to the topological confound of the modern, incorporating (for example) Medusa and the Sphinx, aestivating snails and the alchemy of bees. Lush and extravagant, this is writing tuned in to the terrestrial spectacle.
Virtue and Vice
by C. S. LewisA Pocket Guide to Goodness Few writers have inspired more readers than author C. S. Lewis -- both through the enchanting volumes of his children's series and through his captivating adult classics such as Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and numerous others. Drawn from many works, this volume collects dictionary-like entries of Lewis's keenest observations and best advice on how to live a truly good life. From ambition to charity, despair to duty, hope to humility, Lewis delivers clear, illuminating definitions to live by.
Virtue Ethics and Professional Journalism
by Aaron QuinnThis book examines the moral role of news media practitioners and organizations, and applies a modified philosophical account of Virtue Ethics as a framework for the role of journalists—and journalism organizations—in public life. It shows how journalists and news organizations that adopt an aim towards professional excellence (virtue) by putting a premium on investigative journalism—with both large and small measures depending on the nature of the reporting—can achieve lofty professional goals under modern deadlines. The news media, both electronic and traditional, are imperative to an informed public, and an informed public is critical to a properly functioning cross-section of social, government and corporate domains. The book emphasizes the virtues of justice and integrity as foundational to professional practice. It examines the modern ethical challenges presented by organizations ranging from online upstarts to massive media conglomerates, each that have economic challenges that can inhibit professional excellence through corruption or corrosion. The author applies his account of virtue—bolstered by suggestions for complementary reforms in education and regulation—to improve an ethically challenged industry as it undergoes significant technological change.
Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations
by Patrick Lee PlaisanceThis work establishes a contemporary profile of virtue in professional media practice. Author Patrick Lee Plaisance examines the experiences, perspectives, moral stances, and demographic data of two dozen professional exemplars in journalism and public relations. Plaisance conducted extensive personal "life story" interviews and collected survey data to assess the exemplars’ personality traits, ethical ideologies, moral reasoning skills and perceived workplace climate. The chosen professionals span the geographic United States, and include Pulitzer Prize winners and trendsetting PR corporate executives, ranging from rising stars to established veterans. Their thoughts, opinions, and experiences provide readers with an insider’s perspective on the thought process of decision makers in media. The unique observations in this volume will be stimulating reading for practitioners, researchers, and students in journalism and public relations. Virtue in Media establishes a key benchmark, and sets an agenda for future research into the moral psychology of media professionals.
The Virtue of Sympathy
by Prof. Seth LobisBeginning with an analysis of Shakespeare's The Tempest and building to a new reading of Milton's Paradise Lost, author Seth Lobis charts a profound change in the cultural meaning of sympathy during the seventeenth century. Having long referred to magical affinities in the universe, sympathy was increasingly understood to be a force of connection between people. By examining sympathy in literary and philosophical writing of the period, Lobis illuminates an extraordinary shift in human understanding.
Virtue Revisited in the Novels of Doris Lessing (21st Century Perspectives on British Literature and Society)
by Seda ARIKANThe ethical approaches to literature have come into prominence in the twentieth century, calling for a ‘turn to ethics’ in the studies of humanities, in general, and literary studies, in particular. By leading the ethical turn in literature, many theorists proposed a moral-oriented approach to literature, which is still a significant part of literary criticism. The ethical turn in literature has changed the spirit of literary criticism in the direction of virtue and value-based approaches. In this respect, this study scrutinises Doris Lessing’s novels in light of virtue ethics in general and ‘virtue politics,’ ‘care ethics,’ and ‘Sufi virtue ethics’ in particular. Lessing’s connection to virtue ethics, which is implicitly or explicitly reflected in her novels, is examined by giving the panorama of ethical movements whose common point is virtues. This study asserts that Lessing implements an ethical concern in her novels, which is based on her own understanding of virtue ethics.
The Virtues of Poetry
by James LongenbachAn illuminating look at the many forms of poetry's essential excellence by James Longenbach, a writer with "an ear as subtle and assured as any American poet now writing" (John Koethe)"This book proposes some of the virtues to which the next poem might aspire: boldness, change, compression, dilation, doubt, excess, inevitability, intimacy, otherness, particularity, restraint, shyness, surprise, and worldliness. The word ‘virtue' came to English from Latin, via Old French, and while it has acquired a moral valence, the word in its earliest uses gestured toward a magical or transcendental power, a power that might be embodied by any particular substance or act. With vices I am not concerned. Unlike the short-term history of taste, which is fueled by reprimand or correction, the history of art moves from achievement to achievement. Contemporary embodiments of poetry's virtues abound, and only our devotion to a long history of excellence allows us to recognize them." –from James Longenbach's prefaceThe Virtues of Poetry is a resplendent and ultimately moving work of twelve interconnected essays, each of which describes the way in which a particular excellence is enacted in poetry. Longenbach closely reads poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery (among others), sometimes exploring the ways in which these writers transmuted the material of their lives into art, and always emphasizing that the notions of excellence we derive from art are fluid, never fixed. Provocative, funny, and astute, The Virtues of Poetry is indispensable for readers, teachers, and writers. Longenbach reminds us that poetry delivers meaning in exacting ways, and that it is through its precision that we experience this art's lasting virtues.
The Virtues Reconciled: An Iconographical Study
by Samuel C. ChewThis volume contains the Alexander Lectures in University College, University of Toronto, for the session 1945-46, delivered by Samuel C. Chew, Professor of English Literature at Bryn Mawr College and author of Byron in England and The Crescent and the Rose. For a number of years Professor Chew has been engaged in the study of relation between poetry and the visual arts, especially in the English Renaissance. The Virtues Reconciled embodies his results in an important and more or less self-contained division of this general field. It deals with the allegorical representation, visual and verbal, of the four Virtues, Truth and Justice, Mercy and Peace. The first lecture, "The Friendship of the Arts," considers generally, but with abundant illustrative example, the nature and the relation of verbal and visual imagery. The second lecture, "The Parliament of Heaven," traces the history of the allegory of the Four Daughters of God (Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace), who enters into debate upon the Fall of Man and his future destiny. The problem is resolved, and the Virtues are reconciled, when the Son of God offers Himself in the Atonement. The third lecture examines more closely the various forms in which Truth and Justice are personified, both in art and literature; and the final lecture affords a similar treatment of Mercy and Peace. The argument is illustrated by eighteen plates from paintings, drawings, and title-pages. Many others are described in the text, together with the works of literature which present analogous ideas and images. Of equal value for the light which it throws on the literature of the past and on an aspect of the history of the visual arts, The Virtues Reconciled will also interest the general reader. For, as Professor Chew remarks, "by means of these images our forefathers sought to express their experiences of the changes and chances of this mortal life, and one cannot contemplate them without recognizing that these great commonplaces are still applicable to the human situation."
Virtuosi: A Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great Pianists
by Mark MitchellVirtuosiA Defense and a (Sometimes Erotic) Celebration of Great PianistsMark MitchellA bravura performance!"Vigorous, opinionated, and always entertaining, here is a personal essayist of great charm and sincerity. Mitchell's erudition—his collection of odd and illuminating bits of knowledge—is always a delight and adds a sauce piquanteto the whole dish!" —Edmund White"...a literary work of real élan, vibrancy, and grace—the very qualities that in his view define the virtuoso. [Mr. Mitchell explores] the traditional linking of musical and sexual virtuosity, the ethical implications of the original instruments' movement, the near deification of Mozart in Anglo-Saxon culture, and, in a particularly witty section, the relationship of the virtuoso to his stool. Throughout, Mr. Mitchell's prose is humorous, intimate, and unapologeticaly polemical." —Cynthia OzickThe artistic merit of performers with superior technique has long been almost ipso facto denied. At last, Mark Mitchell launches a counterattack. In essays crackling with pianistic lore, Mitchell takes on topics such as encores, prodigies, competitions, virtuosi in film and literature, and the erotics of musical performance. Liszt, Horowitz, and Argerich share these pages with the eccentric Pachmann, Ervin Nyiregyh ("the skid-row pianist"), and Liberace. The illustrations include rare portraits of long-forgotten girl prodigies, historic concert programs, and stills from a lost 1927 film on Beethoven. Punctuating this celebration of personal voice are vignettes, running from the beginnings of the author's obsession with the piano to the particularities of concert-going in Italy (where he now lives).Mark Mitchell's piano studies led to a friendship with Vladimir Horowitz and other pianistic luminaries. With David Leavitt he co-authored Italian Pleasures and co-edited Pages Passed from Hand to Hand. He also edited The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.
Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature And The Making Of The Virtuous Woman In Early Modern England
by Jessica MurphyWhile many scholars find the early modern triad of virtues for women--silence, chastity, and obedience--to be straightforward and nonnegotiable, Jessica C. Murphy demonstrates that these virtues were by no means as direct and inflexible as they might seem. Drawing on the literature of the period--from the plays of Shakespeare to a conduct manual written for a princess to letters from a wife to her husband--as well as contemporary gender theory and philosophy, she uncovers the multiple meanings of behavioral expectations for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women. Through her renegotiation of cultural ideals as presented in both literary and nonliterary texts of early modern England, Murphy presents models for "acceptable" women's conduct that lie outside of the rigid prescriptions of the time. Virtuous Necessity will appeal to readers interested in early modern English literature, including canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as their female contemporaries such as Amelia Lanyer and Elizabeth Cary. It will also appeal to scholars of conduct literature; of early modern drama, popular literature, poetry, and prose; of women's history; and of gender theory.
Virtuous Vice: Homoeroticism and the Public Sphere
by Eric O. ClarkeIn this daring study of queer life and the public sphere, Eric O. Clarke examines the effects of inclusion within public culture. Departing from studies that emphasize homophobia and its mechanisms of exclusion, Virtuous Vice details how mainstream efforts to represent queers affirmatively continually fall short of full democratic enfranchisement. Clarke draws on contemporary writings along with late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English and European cultural history to investigate how concepts of value, representation, and homoeroticism have interacted and circulated in the West since the Enlightenment. Examining the role of eroticism in citizenship and why only normalizing constructions of homosexuality enable inclusion, Clarke reconsiders the work of Habermas and Foucault in relation to contemporary visibility politics, Kant's moral and political theory, Marx's analysis of value, and the sexualized dynamics of the Victorian cultural public sphere. The juxtaposition of Habermas with Foucault reveals the surprising value of reading the former in the context of queer politics and the usefulness of the theory of the public sphere for understanding contemporary identity politics and the visibility politics of the 1990s. Examining how a host of nonsexual factors impinge historically upon the constitution of sexual identities and practices, Clarke negotiates the relation between questions of publicity and categories of value. Discussions of television sitcoms (such as Ellen), marketing techniques, authenticity, and literary culture add to this daring analysis of visibility politics. As a critique of the claim that equal representation of gays and lesbians necessarily constitutes progress, this significant intervention into social theory will find enthusiastic readers in the fields of Victorian, cultural, literary, and gay and lesbian studies, as well as other fields engaged with categories of identity.
The Virus Paradigm: A Planetary Ecology of the Mind (Elements in Environmental Humanities)
by Roberto MarchesiniIn recent years, the word 'virus' has lost its biological perimeter of reference to acquire a much broader – could say 'paradigmatic' – meaning. The term 'virus' can be seen as a key word or an explanatory model also for processes that go beyond the infectious sphere. Every event appears to have a viral character: from the way information is transmitted to the processes of cultural globalization, from the impact of human beings on the planet to the subversion of ecosystems, from pandemic risks to the demographic increase on the planet. This seems to be indeed the Age of the Virus. Its model can be applied to most of the phenomena that characterize the twenty-first. Its profile – its looming and invisible nature, its ability to use other people's resources to spread and to transform into a dangerous doppelganger – is perfect to represent the fears of the contemporary age.
The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
by Neetu KhannaIn The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Neetu Khanna rethinks the project of decolonization by exploring a knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling that she conceptualizes as the visceral. Khanna focuses on the work of the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA)—a Marxist anticolonial literary group active in India between the 1930s and 1950s—to show how anticolonial literature is a staging ground for exploring racialized emotion and revolutionary feeling. Among others, Khanna examines novels by Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali, and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, as well as the feminist writing of Rashid Jahan and Ismat Chughtai, who each center the somatic life of the body as a fundamental site of colonial subjugation. In this way, decolonial action comes not solely from mental transformation, but from a reconstitution of the sensorial nodes of the body. The visceral, Khanna contends, therefore becomes a critical dimension of Marxist theories of revolutionary consciousness. In tracing the contours of the visceral's role in decolonial literature and politics, Khanna bridges affect and postcolonial theory in new and provocative ways.
Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture
by Peter BalakianPeter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond. " And shadow, the second half of the title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something--a person, an event, an object, a form in nature. " Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, "shadows history," and "casts its own type of illumination," creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination as well as history, trauma, and memory.
Vise and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture
by Peter BalakianPeter Balakian is a renowned poet, scholar, and memoirist; but his work as an essayist often prefigures and illuminates all three. "I think of vise and shadow as two dimensions of the lyric (literary and visual) imagination," he writes in the preface to this collection, which brings together essayistic writings produced over the course of twenty-five years. Vise, "as in grabbing and holding with pressure," but also in the sense of the vise-grip of the imagination, which can yield both clarity and knowledge. Consider the vise-grip of some of the poems of our best lyric poets, how language might be put under pressure "as carbon might be put under pressure to create a diamond." And shadow, the second half of the title: both as noun, "the shaded or darker portion of the picture or view or perspective," "partial illumination and partial darkness"; and as verb, to shadow, "to trail secretly as an inseparable companion" or a "force that follows something with fidelity; to cast a dark light on something—a person, an event, an object, a form in nature."Vise and Shadow draws into conversation such disparate figures as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, Joan Didion, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, and Arshile Gorky, revealing how the lyric imagination of these artists grips experience, "shadows history," and "casts its own type of illumination," creating one of the deepest kinds of human knowledge and sober truth. In these elegantly written essays, Balakian offers a fresh way to think about the power of poetry, art, and the lyrical imagination as well as history, trauma, and memory.
Visible and Invisible Whiteness: American White Supremacy through the Cinematic Lens
by Alice Mikal CravenVisible and Invisible Whiteness examines the complicity between Classical Hollywood narratives or genres and representations of white supremacy in the cinema. Close readings of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation by James Agee and James Baldwin explore these authors’ perspectives on the American mythologies which ground Griffith’s film. The intersectionality of Bordwell’s theories on Classical Hollywood Narrative versus Art Cinema and Richard Dyer’s seminal work on whiteness forms the theoretical base for the book. Featured films are those which have been undervalued or banned due to their hybrid natures with respect to Hollywood and Art Cinema techniques, such as Samuel Fuller’s White Dog and Jean Renoir’s The Southerner. The book offers comparative analyses of American studio-based directors as well as European and European émigrés directors. It appeals to scholars of Film Theory, African American and Whiteness Studies. It provides insight for readers concerned about the re-emergence of white supremacist tensions in contemporary America.
Visible Cities, Global Comics: Urban Images and Spatial Form
by Benjamin FraserCHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2020More and more people are noticing links between urban geography and the spaces within the layout of panels on the comics page. Benjamin Fraser explores the representation of the city in a range of comics from across the globe. Comics address the city as an idea, a historical fact, a social construction, a material-built environment, a shared space forged from the collective imagination, or as a social arena navigated according to personal desire. Accordingly, Fraser brings insights from urban theory to bear on specific comics. The works selected comprise a variety of international, alternative, and independent small-press comics artists, from engravings and early comics to single-panel work, graphic novels, manga, and trading cards, by artists such as Will Eisner, Tsutomu Nihei, Hariton Pushwagner, Julie Doucet, Frans Masereel, and Chris Ware. In the first monograph on this subject, Fraser touches on many themes of modern urban life: activism, alienation, consumerism, flânerie, gentrification, the mystery story, science fiction, sexual orientation, and working-class labor. He leads readers to images of such cities as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, London, Lyon, Madrid, Montevideo, Montreal, New York, Oslo, Paris, São Paolo, and Tokyo. Through close readings, each chapter introduces readers to specific comics artists and works and investigates a range of topics related to the medium’s spatial form, stylistic variation, and cultural prominence. Mainly, Fraser mixes interest in urbanism and architecture with the creative strategies that comics artists employ to bring their urban images to life.