Author: Elissa Marder
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082324055X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.
Author: Pamela Caughie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135650934
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
This collection of ten original essays is the first to read Virginia Woolf through the prism of our technological present. Expanding on the work of feminist and cultural critics of the past two decades, this volume offers a sustained reflection on the relationship between Walter Benjamin's analyses of mass culture and technology and Woolf's cultural productions of the 1920s and 1930s. It also brings out the extent to which Woolf was beginning to image the technological society then taking shape. This book takes part in contemporary efforts to rethink modernism as a more globalized and technologized phenomenon
Author: Judd Trichter
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 125003602X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Set in a near-future LA, a man falls in love with a beautiful android—but when she is kidnapped and sold piecemeal on the black market, he must track down her parts to put her back together. Bad luck for Eliot Lazar, he fell in love with an android, a beautiful C-900 named Iris Matsuo. That's the kind of thing that can get you killed in late 21th century Los Angeles or anywhere else for that matter – anywhere except the man-made island of Avernus, far out in the Pacific, which is where Eliot and Iris are headed once they get their hands on a boat. But then one night Eliot knocks on Iris's door only to find she was kidnapped, chopped up, sold for parts. Unable to move on and unwilling to settle for a woman with a heartbeat, Eliot vows to find the parts to put Iris back together again—and to find the sonofabitch who did this to her and get his revenge. With a determined LAPD detective on his trail and time running out in a city where machines and men battle for control, Eliot Lazar embarks on a bloody journey that will take him to the edge of a moral precipice from which he can never return, from which mankind can never return. Judd Trichter's Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a science fiction love story that asks the question, how far will you go to save someone you love?
Author: Cecily Devereux
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1771125888
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance situates the 1908 dance craze, which The New York Times called “Salomania,” as a crucial event and a turning point in the history of the modern business of erotic dance. Framing Salomania with reference to imperial ideologies of motherhood and race, it works toward better understanding the increasing value of the display of the undressed female body in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This study turns critical attention to cultures of maternity in the late 19th century, primarily with reference to the ways in which women are defined in relation to their genitals as patriarchal property and space and are valued according to reproduction as their primary labour. Erotic dance as it takes shape in the modern representation of Salome insists both that the mother is and is not visible in the body of the dancer, a contradiction this study characterizes as reproductive fetishism. Looking at a range of media, the study traces the modern figure of Salome through visual art, writing, early psychoanalysis and dance, from "hootchie kootch" to the performances dancer Maud Allan called “mimeo-dramatic” to mid-20th-century North American films such as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Charles Lamont's Salome, Where She Danced to the 21st-century HBO series The Sopranos.
Author: Sonja Stojanovic
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800854897
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.
Author: Andrew Parker
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 082235232X
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
Andrew Parker undertakes a critical reconsideration of the frequently absent, or troubled, figure of the mother in theorists including Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida.
Author: Gil Anidjar
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231561288
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 75
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Book Description
Paternal, patriarchal, and fraternal concepts, metaphors, and images have long dominated thinking about politics. But the political, Gil Anidjar argues, has always been maternal. In a series of finely woven meditations on slavery, sovereignty, and the social contract, this book places mothers and mothering at the crux of political thought. Anidjar identifies a maternal sovereignty and a maternal contract, showing that without motherhood, there could be no constitution, preservation, or reproduction of collective existence in time. And maternal power is also power over life and death, as he reveals through a nuanced consideration of abortion. Through the concept of the maternal, Anidjar offers new insights into abiding sources from the Bible and ancient Greece to classical and modern political philosophy—the story of Hagar and Sarah, Oedipus and his two mothers, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave—reinterpreted in light of Black and feminist criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and autotheoretical reflection. Elegantly written and provocative, On the Sovereignty of Mothers offers the maternal as a new frame for understanding the political order.
Author: Eduardo Cadava
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262046040
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 513
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Book Description
A generously illustrated training manual for reading images, discussing work by Félix Nadar, Roland Barthes, Fazal Sheikh, Susan Meiselas, and others. Paper Graveyards is neither a work of traditional art history nor one of literary criticism. It is not strictly a history of ideas either, notwithstanding its very obvious erudition. Rather, in drawing upon all of these methods and approaches—and with extraordinary attention to language and style—Cadava’s writing examines the spectacular explosion of images during the last twenty years as a prompt to discuss not simply specific images but the role and place of these images in our everyday life. Considering work by Félix Nadar, Roland Barthes, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Fazal Sheikh, Susan Meiselas, and others, Cadava delineates different modes of reading that, taking their point of departure from the conviction that the past, the present, and the future are always bound together, provide us with a training manual of sorts for understanding visual material in the twenty-first century. In the process, these generously illustrated essays actively expand our sense of literacy by reconstructing the networks of relations that inhabit the plural worlds of images, and create a critical genealogy of what we still call “an image,” even when, with every day that passes, we perhaps understand less and less what this might mean.
Author: Lauren Bliss
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030458970
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
This book challenges common sense understandings of the unconscious effects of cinema and visual culture. It explores the castrating power of the early modern witch and the historical belief that pregnant women could manipulate and distort body image as figurative analogies for feminist theories of objectification and the male gaze. Through developing this history as an impure but lively analogy, this book serves as a provocation against the dominant imagining of objectification. It offers innovative analyses of a wide-ranging selection of films and topics including Joyce Wieland’s Water Sark (1964) and its resonance with the works of John Cage and Stan Brakhage; the documentary Histoires d’A (History of Abortion, 1973), which contributed to the successful legalisation of abortion in France; the Hong Kong horror film Dumplings (Jiaozi, 餃子 2004), where foetal cannibalism serves up an image of censorship; and the dual productions The Book of Mary (Le livre de Marie) and Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie, 1985) by Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard that figure a self-reproducing virgin who hears herself while remaining a virgin, unseen.
Author: Berit Åström
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319490370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
This anthology explores the recurring trope of the dead or absent mother in Western cultural productions. Across historical periods and genres, this dialogue has been employed to articulate and debate questions of politics and religion, social and cultural change as well as issues of power and authority within the family. Åström seeks to investigate the many functions and meanings of the dialogue by covering extensive material from the 1200s to 2014 including hagiography, romances, folktales, plays, novels, children’s literature and graphic novels, as well as film and television. This is achieved by looking at the discourse both as products of the time and culture that produced the various narratives, and as part of an on-going cultural conversation that spans the centuries, resulting in an innovative text that will be of great interest to all scholars of gender, feminist and media studies.
