Author: Nancy Bombaci
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820478326
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
Freaks in Late Modernist American Culture explores the emergence of what Nancy Bombaci terms «late modernist freakish aesthetics» - a creative fusion of «high» and «low» themes and forms in relation to distorted bodies. Literary and cinematic texts about «freaks» by Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Carson McCullers subvert and reinvent modern progress narratives in order to challenge high modernist literary and social ideologies. These works are marked by an acceptance of the disteleology, anarchy, and degeneration that racist discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries associated with racial and ethnic outsiders, particularly Jews. In a period of American culture beset with increasing pressures for social and political conformity and with the threat of fascism from Europe, these late modernist narratives about «freaks» defy oppressive norms and values as they search for an anarchic and transformational creativity.
Author: Nancy Bombaci
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 694
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Book Description
Author: Katherine Biers
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816687609
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
In 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.
Author: Gerald Cipriani
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443850225
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
Vol.3, No.1 of Culture and Dialogue is a Special Issue in many ways. This issue marks the takeover by a new publisher. Because of contractual constraints and practical reasons the decision was made to continue our journey with Cambridge Scholars Publishing, whose great enthusiasm foreshadows a bright future for the journal. Our words of thanks, however, must also go to Airiti Press without which the journal would not have seen the light of day. We are indebted to Airiti Press for having invested into the launch of a new journal, with all the risks entailed, and for their dedicated hard work. We are most grateful for this. The Journal was officially launched in March 2011 and has since produced four issues, all of which focusing on a particular facet of dialogical practice within the field of culture, be it philosophy, art, or politics. Forthcoming issues will offer platforms to explore how dialogue impacts on the shaping of identity, aesthetic meaning, and historical significance. One issue will also be devoted to how dialogue manifests itself in language. This brings us to autumn 2015, after which other pressing themes will, no doubt, be proposed and treated. In whatever case, the thread remains the cultural forms of dialogue; many of us know how critical ignorance about the nature of the dialogue can be, in all fields, at all levels. Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia once wrote that “To be someone is solitude.” Any self-felt genius or world-leading mortal will identify with this. The solitude at stake is that of the one who fails to link with others, or an Other, by denying the possibility to relinquish some of him or herself. In fact, the true someone is never alone; the true someone never leads. This is the message Culture and Dialogue is striving to convey, express, or analyse in its various forms across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. Besides, the Journal has always sought, when possible, to preserve a certain spirit of writing in addition to academic rigour and creativity – a spirit that is undeniably fading in the midst of the publish or perish ethos adopted by advanced techno-capitalist systems of education in some parts of the world. Vol.3, No.1 is a Special Issue devoted to the theme of “religion and dialogue.” Cosimo Zene, of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, kindly accepted our invitation to be the Guest Editor, and our words of thanks must first go to him. Cosimo has managed to bring together a range of outstanding essays of which the Journal can only be proud. To various degrees and in different ways all essays discuss dialogue and religion, or show dialogue at work in religious studies. We are most grateful to all the authors who generously contributed to this Special Issue and therefore to the life of the Journal; in alphabetical order, T.H. Barrett, Stephen Chan, Jan-Peter Hartung, Sîan Hawthorne, Catherine Heszer, Tullio Lobetti, Theodore Proferes, and Cosimo Zene.
Author: Robin Blyn
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816685894
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 500
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Book Description
Since the 1890s, American artists have employed the arts of the freak show to envision radically different ways of being. The result is a rich avant-garde tradition that critiques and challenges capitalism from within. The Freak-garde traces the arts of the freak show from P. T. Barnum to Matthew Barney and demonstrates how a form of mass culture entertainment became the basis for a distinctly American avant-garde tradition. Exploring a wide range of writers, filmmakers, photographers, and artists who have appropriated the arts of the freak show, Robin Blyn exposes the disturbing power of human curiosities and the desires they unleash. Through a series of incisive and often startling readings, Blyn reveals how such figures as Mark Twain, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, Lon Chaney, Nathanael West, and Diane Arbus use these desires to propose alternatives to the autonomous and repressed subject of liberal capitalism. Blyn explains how, rather than grounding revolutionary subjectivities in imaginary realms innocent of capitalism, freak-garde works manufacture new subjectivities by exploiting potentials inherent to capitalism. Defying conventional wisdom, The Freak-garde ultimately argues that postmodernism is not the death of the avant-garde but the inheritor of a vital and generative legacy. In doing so, the book establishes innovative approaches to American avant-garde practices and embodiment and lays the foundation for a more nuanced understanding of the disruptive potential of art under capitalism.
Author: Gary S. Cross
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350145149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Society has long been fascinated with the freakish, shocking and strange. In this book Gary Cross shows how freakish elements have been embedded in modern popular culture over the course of the 20th century despite the evident disenchantment with this once widespread cultural outlet. Exploring how the spectacle of freakishness conflicted with genteel culture, he shows how the condemnation of the freak show by middle-class America led to a transformation and merging of genteel and freak culture through the cute, the camp and the creepy. Though the carnival and circus freak was marginalised by the 1960s and had largely disappeared by the 1980s, forms of freakish culture survived and today appear in reality TV, horror movies, dark comedies and the popularity of tattoos. Freak Show Legacies will focus less on the individual 'freak' as 'the other' in society, and more on the audience for the freakish and the transformation of wonder, sensibility and sensitivity that this phenomenon entailed. It will use the phenomenon of 'the freak' to understand the transformation of American popular culture across the 20th century, identify elements of 'the freak' in popular culture both past and present, and ask how it has prevailed despite its apparent unpopularity.
Author: Jeffry J. Iovannone
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
Human Menageries: Freak Show Legacies in Contemporary American Literature and Popular Culture Human Menageries examines representations of freaks in late-twentieth century and early-twenty-first century American literature and popular culture. Freak shows reached the height of their popularity between 1840 and 1940, and the performative conventions they established for the display of extraordinary bodies continue within contemporary American culture as a means of defining bodily normalcy and deviance through spectacular visual representation. While some contemporary relocations make use of freak representations to reinforce bodily norms, others appropriate freak identity and conventions in a subversive fashion. Human Menageries enacts a close and historically contextual reading of the work of contemporary writers, visual artists, and performers such as Margaret Cho, Loren Cameron, Octavia E. Butler, Jewelle Gomez, Charlaine Harris, Aimee Bender, and Lady Gaga who revise and appropriate conventions from the historic freak show for purposes of social subversion and critique. This project immerses itself in current discussions within freak studies (a subfield of disability studies initiated by scholars such as Robert Bogdan, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Rachel Adams) that question to what extent bodily spectacles function as forms of exploitation or liberation. Human Menageries mediates this divide by theorizing the multifaceted effects of contemporary relocations of the American freak show and arguing that cultural producers use the freak show's performative conventions to challenge norms of embodiment, draw intersectional connections between multiple non-normative identity positions, and provide interdisciplinary strategies for reading human bodies that gesture toward the creation of a reality in which embodied difference is not regarded as remarkable, but as a standard human attribute.
Author: Mark Dery
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802196128
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 357
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Book Description
A wide-ranging collection of essays on millennial American culture that “marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit” (The New York Times Book Review). From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety—a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic has written, “Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes.” “Dery is the kind of critic who just might give conspiracy theory a good name.” —Wired
Author: Daniel A. Foss
Publisher: New York : Dutton
ISBN:
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Author: Taylor Hagood
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807157279
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
From the emerging field of disability studies, Taylor Hagood offers the first book-length consideration of impairment in William Faulkner's life and writing. Blending biography, textual analysis, and theory in an experimental style, Hagood explores in both form and content the constructs of normality and their power. Hagood brings to light little-known and rarely discussed ways in which Faulkner's personal and familial background were marked by disability and discusses the ways the writer incorporates disability into his fiction. He reevaluates Faulkner's so-called "idiots"-Benjy Compson, Ike Snopes, and others-as characters whose narratives both satisfy and shock the reader. Hagood also examines the roles that impairment and abnormality play in texts such as the stories "The Leg" and "The Kingdom of God" and the novels A Fable and Flags in the Dust. Highly original readings result, including new understandings of: the centrality of the visually impaired Pap in Sanctuary; the disability-centric social order based on interdependence in Pylon; and the disabled speech of Linda Snopes Kohl in The Mansion. Hagood argues that Faulkner's poetics are deeply invested in disability, both in promoting a disability-inclusive fictional world and in exposing and subverting the devaluation of disabled bodies and minds. Hagood draws on firsthand knowledge of his native of Ripley, Mississippi, the ancestral home of the Faulkners, to offer readers otherwise inaccessible contextual information. Moreover, by framing each section of his study within a different kind of discourse-newspaper style, biography, email, and advertisement-he uses the very structure of the book to underscore the questions of normalcy prevalent in disability studies. This rich and unconventional study offers insight into a Faulkner haunted by experiences of disablement and compelled to narrate them in his own writing.
