Author: Maria Tatar
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216215
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Get Book Here
Book Description
In a book that confronts our society's obsession with sexual violence, Maria Tatar seeks the meaning behind one of the most disturbing images of twentieth-century Western culture: the violated female corpse. This image is so prevalent in painting, literature, film, and, most recently, in mass media, that we rarely question what is at stake in its representation. Tatar, however, challenges us to consider what is taking place--both artistically and socially--in the construction and circulation of scenes depicting sexual murder. In examining images of sexual murder (Lustmord), she produces a riveting study of how art and murder have intersected in the sexual politics of culture from Weimar Germany to the present. Tatar focuses attention on the politically turbulent Weimar Republic, often viewed as the birthplace of a transgressive avant-garde modernism, where representations of female sexual mutilation abound. Here a revealing episode in the gender politics of cultural production unfolds as male artists and writers, working in a society consumed by fear of outside threats, envision women as enemies that can be contained and mastered through transcendent artistic expression. Not only does Tatar show that male artists openly identified with real-life sexual murderers--George Grosz posed as Jack the Ripper in a photograph where his model and future wife was the target of his knife--but she also reveals the ways in which victims were disavowed and erased. Tatar first analyzes actual cases of sexual murder that aroused wide public interest in Weimar Germany. She then considers how the representation of murdered women in visual and literary works functions as a strategy for managing social and sexual anxieties, and shows how violence against women can be linked to the war trauma, to urban pathologies, and to the politics of cultural production and biological reproduction. In exploring the complex relationship between victim and agent in cases of sexual murder, Tatar explains how the roles came to be destabilized and reversed, turning the perpetrator of criminal deeds into a defenseless victim of seductive evil. Throughout the West today, the creation of similar ideological constructions still occurs in societies that have only recently begun to validate the voices of its victims. Maria Tatar's book opens up an important discussion for readers seeking to understand the forces behind sexual violence and its portrayal in the cultural media throughout this century.
Author: Charles Werner Haxthausen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452908176
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Get Book Here
Book Description
Essays discuss how Berlin and its culture have been portrayed in literature, poetry, film, cabaret, and the visual arts
Author: Nicholas Royle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137060956
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312
Get Book Here
Book Description
Deconstructions: A User's Guide is a new and unusual kind of book. At once a reference work and a series of inventive essays opening up new directions for deconstruction, it is intended as an authoritative and indispensable guide. With a helpful introduction and specially commissioned essays by leading figures in the field, Deconstructions offers lucid and compelling accounts of deconstruction in relation to a wide range of topics and discourses. Subjects range from the obvious (feminism, technology, postcolonialism) to the less so (drugs, film, weaving). Backed up by an unusually detailed index, this User's Guide demonstrates the innumerable and altering contexts in which deconstructive thinking and practice are at work, both within and beyond the academy, both within and beyond what is called 'the West'.
Author: Annette Burfoot
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 0889205264
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Get Book Here
Book Description
The essays in Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence find important connections in the ways that women are portrayed in relation to violence, whether they are murder victims or killers. The book’s extensive cultural contexts acknowledge and engage with contemporary theories and practices of identity politics and debates about the ethics and politics of representation itself. Does representation produce or reproduce the conditions of violence? Is representation itself a form of violence? This book adds significant new dimensions to the characterization of gender and violence by discussing nationalism and war, feminist media, and the depiction of violence throughout society.
Author: Katharina von Ankum
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 052091760X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book Here
Book Description
Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.
Author: Jenny Holzer
Publisher: Steidl
ISBN: 9783865219374
Category : Projection art
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
"I show what I can with words in light and motion in a chosen place, and when I envelop the time needed, the space around, the noise, smells, the people looking at one another and everything before them, I have given what I know." Jenny Holzer's light projections have taken place across four continents, fifteen countries, and more than thirty cities. From Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie and Daniel Libeskind's Jüdisches Museum in Berlin to I.M. Pei's Pyramide du Louvre in Paris, Holzer's light events have worked in significant architectural spaces. Her projections onto waves and mountains in Rio de Janeiro, the Seine and Arno rivers, the mountains and ski jump in Lillehammer, and the Dune du Pyla, engage the natural landscape as quiet and affecting settings for reflection, laughter, and exchange. Through a discerning selection of full page images printed in black and white, many the result of Holzer's longstanding, working relationship with the photographer Attilio Maranzo, this book tours projections over twelve years. While the artworks themselves are transient, each image suspends the tension of the passing moment and locates the beauty of experience within the frame.
Author: Martin L. Davies
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857710990
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Get Book Here
Book Description
International scholars explore the ways in which knowledge actually operates, showing the limitations of now outmoded disciplines. Coming from fields as diverse as anthropology, philosophy, literature, aesthetics and art practice, together they break down the boundaries between entrenched domains of knowledge. Studies of objects which confound traditional definitions - including a mechanical cow invented by an Irish farmer, and the curious case of a mechanical monk - show how a close look at an individual object can, paradoxically, open up dynamic new "reconceptions" of traditional systems of knowledge. With social uses of knowledge currently a matter of public debate, this should be a timely text.
Author: Frederic J. Schwartz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262047705
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 427
Get Book Here
Book Description
How artists in twentieth-century Germany adapted the idea of the medical or legal case as an artistic strategy to push to the fore sexualities, scandals, and crimes that were otherwise concealed. In early twentieth-century Germany, the artistic avant-garde borrowed procedures from the medical and juridical realms to expose and debate matters that society preferred remain hidden and unspoken. Frederic J. Schwartz explores how the evocation or creation of a “case” provided artists with a means to engage themes that ranged from blasphemy to Lustmord, or sexual murder. Shedding light on the case as a cultural form, Schwartz shows its profound effect on artists and the ways it dovetailed with methods used by these figures to exploit fundamental changes taking place across the mass media of their time. As Schwartz shows, the case was a common denominator that connected seemingly disparate works. George Grosz and Rudolf Schlichter drew on it for their violent visual art, as did architect Adolf Loos when he equated ornament with crime. Expressionists, meanwhile, approached the question of whether the so-called “mad” shared a right of public expression with those deemed sane, and examined medical and legal approaches to what society labeled as insanity. The case also took on a personal dimension when artists found themselves confronted with, or chose to engage with, the legal system. German courts prosecuted John Heartfield and others for their provocative works, while Bertolt Brecht created publicity for himself by suing the firm to whom he sold the film rights to The Threepenny Opera. Provocative and insightful, The Culture of the Case offers a privileged view of the spaces of representation in which images—in some instances, as cases—functioned at a key moment of modernity.
Author: Brian King
Publisher: Bloat Books
ISBN: 9780965032407
Category : Criminal psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Get Book Here
Book Description
These compelling authentic documents are now available for the first time in one volume -- an aesthetic testimony to the emotion and logic of a murderer's mind, a mind filled with terror and hatred, absurdity and horror, pathos and iniquity."Brian King compiled these writings and arranged them in their present order to illustrate the bizarre logic that surfaces in people who are driven into the territory of the criminally insane. He shows with comments and sequence the human delusions and viewpoints that preoccupied the minds of the individuals before, during and after the illegal, cruel, and terrible violent crimes. -- Herbert Mullin, a serial killer who murdered thirteen people in the Santa Cruz area of California between October 1972 and February 1973.A compilation of essays, short stories, memoirs, confessions, letters, manifestoes, poetry, drawings, photographs and other works created by serial killers, mass murderers, cannibals, necrophiles, sexual sadists, psychopaths and assassins."In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings. I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons and last but not least I have committed sodomy on more than 1,000 male human beings. For all of these things I am not the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don't believe in Man, God nor devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself". -- Carl Panzram, murderer"I wish I could enact a law that would make a dull mind an infamous crime. I'm that embittered. They've done that much to me. Every time they waddle by with a filthy story created by a filthier mind, I wonder. There they go. Free. My potential executioners. Obese in mindand body. The men who perpetrate the world with social, cultural and historical lunacy. They get to kill me. Then I laugh. I know. The whole world has suddenly gone mad. Nothing matters". -- Charles Schmid, Jr., murderer
Author: Andrew Webber
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 9780947623333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Get Book Here
Book Description
