Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock

Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock PDF Author: Tom Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521465847
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The material elements of writing have long been undervalued, and have been dismissed by recent historicising trends of criticism; but analysis of these elements - sound, signature, letters - can transform our understanding of literary texts. In this 1994 book Tom Cohen shows how, in an era of representational criticism and cultural studies, the role of close reading has been overlooked. Arguing that much recent criticism has been caught in potentially regressive models of representation, Professor Cohen undertakes to counter this by rethinking the 'materiality' of the text itself. Through a series of revealing new readings of the work of writers including Plato, Bakhtin, Poe, Whitman and Conrad, Professor Cohen exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and demonstrates how 'the materiality of language' operates to undo the representational models of meaning imposed by the literary canon.

Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock

Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock PDF Author: Tom Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521465847
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
The material elements of writing have long been undervalued, and have been dismissed by recent historicising trends of criticism; but analysis of these elements - sound, signature, letters - can transform our understanding of literary texts. In this 1994 book Tom Cohen shows how, in an era of representational criticism and cultural studies, the role of close reading has been overlooked. Arguing that much recent criticism has been caught in potentially regressive models of representation, Professor Cohen undertakes to counter this by rethinking the 'materiality' of the text itself. Through a series of revealing new readings of the work of writers including Plato, Bakhtin, Poe, Whitman and Conrad, Professor Cohen exposes the limitations of new historicism and neo-pragmatism, and demonstrates how 'the materiality of language' operates to undo the representational models of meaning imposed by the literary canon.

Hitchcock's Cryptonymies

Hitchcock's Cryptonymies PDF Author: Tom Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816641714
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This second volume presents the director's work as a radical collage of images and absences, letters and numbers, citations and sounds that together mark Hitchcock as a knowing figure who was entirely aware of this - and cinema's place at the dawn of a global media culture, as well as the cinema's revolutionary impact on perception and memory.

Hitchcocks Cryptonymies

Hitchcocks Cryptonymies PDF Author: Tom Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452906432
Category : Spy films
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
"Tom Cohen's radical exploration of Hitchcock's cinema departs from conventional approaches-psychoanalytic, feminist, political-to emphasize the dense web of signatures and markings inscribed on and around his films. Aligning Hitchcock's agenda with the philosophical and aesthetic writings of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Benjamin, Cohen's project dramatically recasts the history and meaning of cinema itself.This first volume of Hitchcock's Cryptonymies provides a singularly close reading of films such as The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, and North by Northwest, exposing the often imperceptible visual and aural puns, graphic elements, and cryptograms that traverse his entire body of work. Within Hitchcock's cinema, Cohen argues, these "secret agents" have more than just decorative or symbolic significance; they also reflect, critique, and disrupt traditional cinematic practice, undermining ways of seeing inherited from the Enlightenment and prefiguring postmodern culture. From the recurrence of the eye motif and the frequency of names beginning with "Mar" to the role of memory and the director's trademark cameos, Cohen offers an unprecedented guide to the entirety of Hitchcock's labyrinthine signature system. At the same time, he liberates Hitchcock's works from film history (modernist, auteurist), revealing them as unsettled events in the archaeology of contemporary global image culture. Tom Cohen is professor of American literary, critical, and cinematic studies at the University at Albany. He is the author of Anti-Mimesis: From Plato to Hitchcock and Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, and coeditor of Material Events (Minnesota, 2000)." -- Publisher.

Ideology and Inscription

Ideology and Inscription PDF Author: Tom Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599672
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
A critique of cultural studies that invokes Bakhtin, Benjamin, and de Man.

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory

An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory PDF Author: Andrew Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131786431X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Fresh, original and compelling, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘the beginning’ and concluding with ‘the end’, the book covers topics that range from the familiar (character, narrative, the author) to the more unusual (secrets, pleasure, ghosts). Eschewing abstract isms, Bennett and Royle successfully illuminate complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works – so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, whilst Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literary laughter. Each chapter ends with a narrative guide to further reading and the book also includes a glossary and bibliography. The fourth edition has been revised to incorporate two timely new chapters on animals and the environment. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of both reading and studying literature.

The Object of Literature

The Object of Literature PDF Author: Pierre Macherey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521476782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This 1995 book by Pierre Macherey was his first dealing with literature and theory since his seminal A Theory of Literary Production. Continuing the project of Althusserian theory, Macherey engages in a series of close exegeses of classical texts in French literature and philosophy, from the late eighteenth century down to the 1970s, that explore the historically variable but thematically similar ways in which literary texts represent philosophical ideas. Rejecting the simple notion that literature deploys philosophical topoi in an unmediated manner, Macherey shows the conceptual sophistication - and broad intellectual influence - that literary art has displayed in the modern period. At once a theoretical meditation of great originality and a historical work of scrupulous scholarship, The Object of Literature will entrench Pierre Macherey's already considerable reputation as one of the most significant contemporary theoreticians of literature.

Novels Behind Glass

Novels Behind Glass PDF Author: Andrew H. Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521471336
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Drawing on work in critical theory, feminism and social history, this book traces the lines of tension shot through Victorian culture by the fear that the social world was being reduced to a display window behind which people, their actions and their convictions were exhibited for the economic appetites of others. Affecting the most basic elements of Victorian life - the vagaries of desire, the rationalisation of social life, the gendering of subjectivity, the power of nostalgia, the fear of mortality, the cyclical routines of the household - the ambivalence generated by commodity culture organizes the thematic concerns of these novels and the society they represent. Taking the commodity as their point of departure, chapters on Thackeray, Gaskell, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 suggest that Victorian novels provide us with graphic and enduring images of the power of commodities to affect the varied activities and beliefs of individual and social experience.

Theorising Textual Subjects

Theorising Textual Subjects PDF Author: Meili Steele
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521576796
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Addresses one of the central crises in critical theory today: how to theorise the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and a dialogical agent.

Kenneth Burke

Kenneth Burke PDF Author: Robert Wess
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521422581
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Kenneth Burke, arguably the most important American literary theorist of the twentieth century, helped define the theoretical terrain for contemporary literary and cultural studies. His perspectives were literary and linguistic, but his influences ranged across history, philosophy, and the social sciences. In this important study, first published in 1996, Robert Wess traces the trajectory of Burke's long career and situates his work in relation to postmodernity. His study is both an examination of contemporary theories of rhetoric, ideology, and the subject, and an explanation of why Burke failed to complete his Motives trilogy. Burke's own critique of the 'isolated unique individual' led him to question the possibility of unique individuation, a strategy which anticipated important elements of postmodern concepts of subjectivity. Robert Wess' study is a judicious exposition of Burke's massive oeuvre, and a crucial intervention in debates on rhetoric and human agency.

Derrida and Autobiography

Derrida and Autobiography PDF Author: Robert Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521465816
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
The work of Jacques Derrida can be seen to reinvent most theories. In this book Robert Smith offers both a reading of the philosophy of Derrida and an investigation of current theories of autobiography. Smith argues that for Derrida autobiography is not so much subjective self-revelation as relation to the other, not so much a general condition of thought as a general condition of writing - what Derrida calls the 'autobiography of the writing' - which mocks any self-centred finitude of living and dying. In this context, and using literary-critical, philosophical, and psychoanalytical sources, Smith thinks through Derrida's texts in a new, but distinctly Derridean, way, and finds new perspectives to analyse the work of classical writers including Hegel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, and de Man.