Author: Rachel Gabara
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804753562
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
This book is a study of recent autobiographies by French and Francophone African writers and filmmakers, all of whom reject simple first-person narration and experiment with narrative voice and form to represent fragmented subjectivity. Gabara investigates autobiography across media, from print to photography and film, as well as across the colonial encounter, from France to Francophone North and West Africa. Reading works by Roland Barthes, Nathalie Sarraute, Assia Djebar, Cyril Collard, David Achkar, and Raoul Peck, she argues that autobiographical film and African autobiography, subgenres that have until now been overlooked or dismissed by critics, offer new and important possibilities for self-representation in the twenty-first century. Not only do these new forms of autobiography deserve our attention, but any study of contemporary autobiography is incomplete without them.
Author: Natalie Edwards
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443821055
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
The “Self” Which is Not One: Women’s Life-Writing in French, assembles articles on women’s life-writing from diverse areas of the Francophone world. It is comprised of nine chapters that discuss female writers from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, in addition to French writers. The idea of the self is currently attracting widespread interest in academia, most notably in the arts and humanities. The development of postmodernism supposes a fragmented “subject” formed from the network of available discourses, rather than a stable and coherent self. Jacques Derrida, for example, wrote that there is no longer any such things as a “full subject,” and Julia Kristeva now insists that the individual is a “subject in process.” The growing importance of psychoanalytic theory, particular in French studies, has also impacted upon this development. The basic tenet of psychoanalytic theory is that the individual is formed of a duality: the conscious and unconscious parts of the self which prevent the individual from ever fully knowing her/himself, and which thus insists upon a plural, incomplete self. Developments in the field of postcolonial studies have also made us aware of different ways of approaching the self in different parts of the world, and eroded the idea of a stable, conscious and complete self. As scholars examine these new ways of approaching the self, autobiography has been the subject of renewed interest. Several academic books have appeared in recent years that study the ways in which autobiographers represent the self as incomplete, evolving and elusive. In particular, a number of books have appeared on the subject of women’s autobiography and female subjectivity, such as works by Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson and Nancy Miller, and several volumes interrogate postcolonial women’s autobiography, such as texts by Françoise Lionnet, Gayatri Spivak, Carole Boyce Davies and Chandra Mohanty. Our volume unites these strands of criticism, by examining ways that female autobiographies write the self as a fragmented, plural construct across the Francophone world. This will be the first book-length study of this important development. This volume will be of interest primarily to students and scholars working in the areas of life-writing, French and Francophone studies, postcolonial studies and gender studies. The volume contributes to multiple areas that are currently garnering substantial interest in academe: postcolonial studies, Francophone studies, gender studies and women’s writing. By comparing works from across the Francophone world, our volume takes a global approach to the genre of autobiography and its inflections by women writers. The “Self” That is Not One in Women’s Autobiography in French therefore represents a timely intervention in several interlinking academic fields and will thus garner substantial interest.
Author: Akane Kawakami
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351191578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
"Why do photographs interest writers, especially autobiographical writers? Ever since their invention, photographs have featured - as metaphors, as absent inspirations, and latterly as actual objects - in written texts. In autobiographical texts, their presence has raised particularly acute questions about the rivalry between these two media, their relationship to the 'real', and the nature of the constructed self. In this timely study, based on the most recent developments in the fields of photography theory, self-writing and photo-biography, Akane Kawakami offers an intriguing narrative which runs from texts containing metaphorical photographs through ekphrastic works to phototexts. Her choice of Marcel Proust, Herve Guibert, Annie Ernaux and Gerard Mace provides unusual readings of works seldom considered in this context, and teases out surprising similarities between unexpected conjunctions. Akane Kawakami is a Senior Lecturer in French and francophone literature at Birkbeck University of London."
Author: Elizabeth Schechter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192537512
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.
Author: Douglas Keesey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1628466987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
Over the last five decades, the films of director Brian De Palma (b. 1940) have been among the biggest successes (The Untouchables; Mission: Impossible) and the most high-profile failures (The Bonfire of the Vanities) in Hollywood history. De Palma helped launch the careers of such prominent actors as Robert De Niro, John Travolta, and Sissy Spacek (who was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress in Carrie). Indeed, Quentin Tarantino named Blow Out as one of his top three favorite films, praising De Palma as the best living American director. Picketed by feminists protesting its depictions of violence against women, Dressed to Kill helped to create the erotic thriller genre. Scarface, with its over-the-top performance by Al Pacino, remains a cult favorite. In the twenty-first century, De Palma has continued to experiment, incorporating elements from videogames (Femme Fatale), tabloid journalism (The Black Dahlia), YouTube, and Skype (Redacted and Passion) into his latest works. What makes De Palma such a maverick even when he is making Hollywood genre films? Why do his movies often feature megalomaniacs and failed heroes? Is he merely a misogynist and an imitator of Alfred Hitchcock? To answer these questions, author Douglas Keesey takes a biographical approach to De Palma's cinema, showing how De Palma reworks events from his own life into his films. Written in an accessible style and including a chapter on every one of his films to date, this book is for anyone who wants to know more about De Palma's controversial films or who wants to better understand the man who made them.
Author: Marvin D'Lugo
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118325389
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 586
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Book Description
A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar “Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen M. Vernon give us the ideal companion to Pedro Almodóvar’s films. Established and emerging writers offer a rainbow of insights for fans as well as academics.” Jerry W. Carlson, Professor of Film Studies, The City College & Graduate Center CUNY “Rarely has a contemporary film artist been treated to the kind of broad, rich discussion of their work that can be found in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar.” Richard Peña, Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University Once the enfant terrible of Spain’s youth culture explosion, the Movida, Pedro Almodóvar’s distinctive film style and career longevity have made him one of the most successful and internationally known filmmakers of his generation. Offering a state-of-the-art appraisal of Almodóvar’s cinema, this original collection is a searching analysis of his technique and cultural significance that includes work by leading authorities on Almodóvar as well as talented young scholars. Crucially included here are contributions by film historians from Almodóvar’s native Spain, where he has been undervalued by the academic and critical establishment. With a balance between textual and contextual approaches, the book expands the scope of previous work on the director to explore his fruitful collaborations with fellow professionals in the areas of art design, fashion, and music as well as the growing reach of a global Almodóvar brand beyond Europe and the United States to Latin America and Asia. It also proposes a reevaluation of the political meanings and engagement of his cinema from the perspective of the profound cultural and historical upheavals that have transformed Spain since the 1970s.
Author: Philip Mosley
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791447482
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Explores the historical evolution of Belgian cinema as well as its contemporary situation within the evolving contexts of global media and European unity.
Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110381486
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 2857
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Book Description
Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.
Author: Susan Courtney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190459980
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Split Screen Nation traces an oppositional dynamic between the screen West and the screen South that was unstable and dramatically shifting in the decades after WWII, and has marked popular ways of imagining the U.S. ever since. If this dynamic became vivid in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), itself arguably a belated response to Easy Rider (1969), this book helps us understand those films, and much more, through an eclectic history of U.S. screen media from the postwar era. It deftly analyzes not only Hollywood films and television, but also educational and corporate films, amateur films (aka "home movies"), and military and civil defense films featuring "tests" of the atomic bomb in the desert. Attentive to sometimes profoundly different contexts of production and consumption shaping its varied examples, Split Screen Nation argues that in the face of the Cold War and the civil rights struggle an implicit, sometimes explicit, opposition between the screen West and the screen South nonetheless mediated the nation's most paradoxical narratives--namely, "land of the free"/land of slavery, conquest, and segregation. Whereas confronting such contradictions head-on could capsize cohesive conceptions of the U.S., by now familiar screen forms of the West and the South split them apart to offer convenient, discrete, and consequential imaginary places upon which to collectively project avowed aspirations and dump troubling forms of national waste. Pinpointing some of the most severe yet understudied postwar trends fueling this dynamic--including non-theatrical film road trips, feature films adapted from Tennessee Williams, and atomic test films--and mining their potential for more complex ways of thinking and feeling the nation, Split Screen Nation considers how the vernacular screen forms at issue have helped shape how we imagine not only America's past, but also the limits and possibilities of its present and future.
Author: Steven Chung
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452941513
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Shin Sang-ok (1926–2006) was arguably the most important Korean filmmaker of the postwar era. Over seven decades, he directed or produced nearly 200 films, including A Flower in Hell (1958) and Pulgasari (1985), and his career took him from late-colonial Korea to postwar South and North Korea to Hollywood. Notoriously crossing over to the North in 1978, Shin made a series of popular films under Kim Jong-il before seeking asylum in 1986 and resuming his career in South Korea and Hollywood. In Split Screen Korea, Steven Chung illuminates the story of postwar Korean film and popular culture through the first in-depth account in English of Shin’s remarkable career. Shin’s films were shaped by national division and Cold War politics, but Split Screen Korea finds surprising aesthetic and political continuities across not only distinct phases in modern South Korean history but also between South and North Korea. These are unveiled most dramatically in analysis of the films Shin made on opposite sides of the DMZ. Chung explains how a filmmaking sensibility rooted in the South Korean market and the global style of Hollywood could have been viable in the North. Combining close readings of a broad range of films with research on the industrial and political conditions of Korean film production, Split Screen Korea shows how cinematic styles, popular culture, and intellectual discourse bridged the divisions of postwar Korea, raising new questions about the implications of political partition.
