The novel has prompted comparisons to Miguel de Cervantes, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and even the Bible. The new edition of this critical volume brings together full-length essays that explore the nuances of Marquez's captivating fictive world. This study guide comes complete with an introductory essay by master scholar Harold Bloom, notes on the contributors, and reference features such as a chronology, bibliography, and index.

    In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form. Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth. The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose materialist metaphysics he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century ur-form of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time--from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons--as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique. Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south--Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples--and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of dialectics at a standstill. She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of afterimages to have the last word.

    The illuminating essays—complete with music history, social commentary, and personal appraisals—double as a mini-history of popular music. Here you will find singles by artists as wide-ranging as Aretha Franklin, George Jones, Roy Orbison, the Sex Pistols, Madonna, Run-D.M.C., and Van Halen. Featuring a new preface that covers the hits—and misses—of the '90s, The Heart of Rock & Soul remains as provocative, passionate, and timeless as the music it praises.

    Selected essays from the rich and complex collection of Edouard Glissant, one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean, examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophical implications of cultural dependency.

    More than 240 pictures in striking duotone celebrate these exhilarating comedies.

    It is an anatomy of film criticism meant to reset the agenda for film scholarship. As such Making Meaning should be a landmark book, a focus for debate from which future film study will evolve.Bordwell systematically maps different strategies for interpreting films and making meaning, illustrating his points with a vast array of examples from Western film criticism. Following an introductory chapter that sets out the terms and scope of the argument, Bordwell goes on to show how critical institutions constrain and contain the very practices they promote, and how the interpretation of texts has become a central preoccupation of the humanities. He gives lucid accounts of the development of film criticism in France, Britain, and the United States since World War II; analyzes this development through two important types of criticism, thematic-explicatory and symptomatic; and shows that both types, usually seen as antithetical, in fact have much in common. These diverse and even warring schools of criticism share conventional, rhetorical, and problem-solving techniques--a point that has broad-ranging implications for the way critics practice their art. The book concludes with a survey of the alternatives to criticism based on interpretation and, finally, with the proposal that a historical poetics of cinema offers the most fruitful framework for film analysis.

    Drawing from a number of aesthetic and literary sources, Perry Nodelman explores the ways in which the interplay of the verbal and visual aspects of picture books conveys more narrative information and stimulation than either medium could achieve alone. Moving from "baby" books, alphabet books, and word books to such well-known children's picture books as Nancy Ekholm Burkert's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Gerald McDermott's Arrow to the Sun, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Chris Van Allsburg's The Garden of Abdul Gasazi, Nodelman reveals how picture-book narrative is affected by the exclusively visual information of picture-book design and illustration as well as by the relationships between pictures and their complementary texts.

    This bestseller balances a comprehensive and up-to-date anthology of major documents in literary criticism and theory — from Plato to the present — with the most thorough editorial support for understanding these challenging readings.

    This co-winner of the 1993 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize has been expanded to include three entirely new chapters that add a Lacanian perspective and a view of the carnivalesque to an already brilliant interpretive study of Caribbean culture. As he did in the first edition, Benítez-Rojo redefines the Caribbean by drawing on history, economics, sociology, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and nonlinear mathematics. His point of departure is chaos theory, which holds that order and disorder are not the antithesis of each other in nature but function as mutually generative phenomena. Benítez-Rojo argues that within the apparent disorder of the Caribbean—the area’s discontinuous landmasses, its different colonial histories, ethnic groups, languages, traditions, and politics—there emerges an “island” of paradoxes that repeats itself and gives shape to an unexpected and complex sociocultural archipelago. Benítez-Rojo illustrates this unique form of identity with powerful readings of texts by Las Casas, Guillén, Carpentier, García Márquez, Walcott, Harris, Buitrago, and Rodríguez Juliá.

    THE POLITICS OF POETIC FORM: POETRY AND PUBLIC POLICY is a series of essays from a discussion that occurred at the New School for Social Research in New York. The discussion mines the relationship between poetic composition and political expression. Poetry's relationship to public policy typically has a questionable margin of relation. Not only does this volume posit that poetry is a dynamic medium for the consideration of political ideas, it focuses on the ideological weight specific formal innovations bring to poetry. Some of the writers include Jerome Rothenberg, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey and Charles Bernstein.

    In his development, the merging of these special talents has made Foote almost unique in the history of American literature, for few other great modern authors have proved to be master storytellers in both fiction and historical narrative.In Conversations with Shelby Foote, this novelist-historian expresses penetrating and often humorous remarks about major modern writers as well as about the classical writers of fiction, plays, poetry, and historical narrative. In one interview Foote explains how Homer's Iliad and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past were his chief models for writing his history of the Civil War.Foote recounts also what it was like to grow up in a small Mississippi town in the first half of the twentieth century and tells how his observations of African Americans and whites of all classes influenced his fiction and history writing.These eighteen interviews spanning thirty-seven years not only detail Shelby Foote's exploration of southern history, race relations, and the role of literature in the formation and preservation of a culture but also reveal his evolution into a great narrative artist.

    Through a series of readings in the work of the decisive triumvirate of Victorian fiction, Dickens, Trollope and Wilkie Collins, Miller investigates the novel as an oblique form of social control.

    'The Art of Excess' combines intensive literary scholarship and wide-ranging multidisciplinary though to restore the meaning of criticism - evaluation - to the study of recent American fiction.

    His best-known plays include The Castle, Scenes from an Execution and The Possibilities. All of his plays are emotionally highly charged, intellectually stimulating and far removed from the theatrical conventions of what he terms ‘the Establishment Theatre’. These fragments, essays, thoughts and poems on the nature of theatre likewise reject the constraints of ‘objective’ academic theatre criticism. They explore the collision (and collusion) of intellect and artistry in the creative act. This book is more than a collection of essays: it is a cultural manifesto for Barker’s own ‘Theatre of Catastrophe’.

    Dewey is the central figure in this pantheon of pragmatists, but he treats as well such varied mid-century representatives of the tradition as Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, DuBois, Niebuhr & Trilling. West’s genealogy is a personal work, for it's imbued throughout with the author’s conviction that a thoro reexamination of American pragmatism may help inspire & instruct contemporary efforts to remake & reform American society & culture. "West...may well be the pre-eminent African American intellectual of our generation."—The Nation "The American Evasion of Philosophy is a highly intelligent & provocative book. Cornel West gives us illuminating readings of the political thought of Emerson & James; provides a penetrating critical assessment of Dewey, his central figure; & offers a brilliant interpretation—appreciative yet far from uncritical—of the contemporary philosopher & neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty...What shines thru, throughout the work, is West's firm commitment to a radical vision of a philosophic discourse as inextricably linked to cultural criticism & political engagement."—Paul S. Boyer, professor emeritus of history, University of Wisconsin–MadisonAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1 The Emersonian prehistory of American pragmatism. Emerson on power & tradition; Emerson on provocation & the market; Emerson on personality & race; Emerson as organic intellectual2 The historic emergence of American pragmatism. Peirce on scientific method, community & Christian love; James on individuality, reconciliation & heroic energies3 The coming-of-age of American pragmatism: John Dewey. Dewey on historical consciousness, critical intelligence & creative democracy4 The dilemma of the mid-century pragmatic intellectual. Sidney Hook: the Deweyan political intellectual; C. Wright Mills: the neo-Deweyan radical social critic; W.E.B. Du Bois: the Jamesian organic intellectual; Reinhold Niebuhr: the Jamesian cultural critic; Lionel Trilling: the pragmatist as Arnoldian literary critic; The decline & resurgence of American pragmatism: Quine & Richard Rorty5 Prophetic pragmatism: cultural criticism & political engagement. Roberto Unger & 3rd-Wave Left romanticism; The challenge of Michel Foucault; Tragedy, tradition & political praxis; Prophetic pragmatism & postmodernityNotesIndex

    Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself. Hip, metaphorical and allusive...--Gail Caldwell, Boston Sunday Globe. Full-color illustrations and halftones.

    --William F. Buckley, Jr.

    This is a compilation of the best works by Nik Cohn, one of the great British feature writers on pop music.

    At the height of his career, he often performed in six different plays on six consecutive days. He stopped reinventing himself when he died on April 23, 1616, but, as Gary Taylor tells us in this bold, provocative, irreverent history of Shakespeare's reputation through the ages, we have been reinventing him ever since. Taylor, who sparked a worldwide controversy in 1985 by announcing his discovery of a new Shakespeare poem Shall I die?, presents a brilliantly argued, wryly humorous discussion of the ways in which society reinvents Shakespeare--and to some extent all great literature--to suit its own ends. He reveals how Shakespeare's reputation has benefited from such diverse and unpredictable factors as the dearth of new plays after the Restoration; the decline of tragedy in the eighteenth century, when, as Taylor puts it, Shakespeare was kept on the menu because he was the only serious dish [the repertoire companies] knew how to cook; the changing social status of women in the nineteenth century; England's longstanding rivalry with France, which turned Shakespeare into the great advocate of conservative British values; and the current trend in academia toward shockingly unorthodox views, which has turned Shakespeare into the great ally of radical Marxist and feminist critics. Through the centuries, critics have cited the same Shakespeare--often the very same play--as the supporter of a vast array of world views. Examining each period's method of invoking the Bard's greatness to support a series of conflicting values, Taylor questions what actually constitutes greatness. He insists on examining the criteria of each epoch on its own terms in order to demonstrate how literary criticism can often become the most telling form of social commentary. Reinventing Shakespeare offers nothing less than a major reevaluation of Shakespeare, his writing, his place in world history, and the very bases of aesthetic judgment.

    Unlike other scholars who discuss these practices as totally separate from Hollywood, James argues that they were developed in various kinds of dialogue or negotiation with the commercial film industry. He also demonstrates that the formal properties of the films were determined not simply by aesthetic considerations but by the functions the films served in the various subcultures and dissident groups that produced them. After an opening chapter on film hermeneutics, the book gives detailed accounts of the contrary projects of two exemplary filmmakers: Stan Brakhage, who pioneered an artisanal, domestic film practice, and Andy Warhol, who redirected such a practice toward the film industry. James then discusses the beats and other idealist countercultures, the social groups that formed around civil rights and the Vietnam War, artists who shunned social involvement for pure film ("structural" film), and finally the women's movement.

    This second edition continues to offer the most comprehensive scrutiny of the Tales both as a whole and individually. In addition, Cooper incorporates themost significant recent scholarship and criticism, reflecting current research in the areas of Chaucer's historical and social context and developments in the interpretation of Chaucer's presentation of women.

    It presents East and West: from the Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu to the works of Karl Marx, Charles Baudelaire, and William Carlos Williams. Supplementing the sixty short essays originally published as Classics Revisited in 1969 are forty-one pieces from With Eye and Ear (1970) and The Elastic Retort (1973), both long out of print, as well as various previously uncollected or unpublished essays. Taken together, these hundred and one critiques stand, writes editor Bradford Morrow, “as a primer, or Baedeker, to a whole terrain of thought, to one man’s study of imagination and its field of conjuries.” The New Directions edition of Classics Revisited was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection, attesting to the wide appeal of Rexroth’s learning and humanity.

    We've merely been taught to talk as if it had: as though weather maps were more 'real' than the breath of autumn; as though, for that matter, Reason was really 'cool.' What we're saying whenever we say is a theme this book illumines for anyone attentive." — Hugh Kenner, Johns Hopkins University "In this bold and powerful book, Lakoff and Turner continue their use of metaphor to show how our minds get hold of the world. They have achieved nothing less than a postmodern Understanding Poetry, a new way of reading and teaching that makes poetry again important." — Norman Holland, University of Florida

    Often based on common fantasies of Middle-Eastern women, this obsession nevertheless produced wonderfully evocative images.Buonaventura also documents the impact the genre had on fashion, theatre and film at the turn of the century, and explores present and future trends in Arabic dance.Wendy Buonaventura is an established dancer and choreographer who pioneered the development of Arabic dance as a theatre art in the West. She performs and lectures internationally and has written and presented programmes for the BBC. She is the author of Beauty and the East and I Put a Spell on You, both published by Saqi Books. Her website is www.buonaventura.com.

    A poststructuralist literary history - Nelson's premise that the history of modernist culture is one we no longer know we have forgotten and he aims to recover the political questions many forgotten modern poets looked straight in the eye.

    This book provides a fresh interpretation of the Republic and a new understanding of philosophy as practiced by Plato and Socrates."Cryptic allusions, startling paradoxes, new questions . . . all work to give brilliant new insights into the Platonic text."—Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Political Theory

    The distinguished contributors to Breaking the Sequence present women innovators from a variety of perspectives--feminist, poststructural, intertextual, and historical. The editors' introduction, tracing three generations of women experimental writers, proposes that the exemplary feminine discourse hypothesized by critics for over two decades can be found in women's experimental fiction: by exploding dominant forms, women experimental writers not only assail the social structure but also produce an alternate fictional space in which the feminine can be expressed. The rupturing of traditional forms is a political act, and thus the feminine narrative resulting from such rupture is allied with the feminist project.

    It describes how the fictional genre became the main vehicle for female self-expression.

    First, they show a diversity of concerns. These include spirituality, sexuality, the representation of women in art, the necessary inter-relationship of theory and action, women as artmakers, ethnicity, language itself, so-called postfeminism and critiques of hte art world, the discipline of art history and the practice of art criticism. Second, the contributors' work has not been either widely disseminated or readily available. Third, the essays, especially arranged as they are (chronologically), demonstrate a continuous feminist discourse in art from the early 1970s through the present, a discourse that is neither monolithic nor intellectually trendy but that rather exhibits many elements, the polemical, Marxist, lyrical, and poststructuralist being only a few."

    

    An analysis of the "Odyssey", this book tells the epic tale and provides information on the psychology of the characters, the role of the gods, the structure of the poem and the significance of the names of the characters.

    . . . Her book is not about works of 'primitive art' as such, but about the Western construction 'Primitive Art.' It is a critique of Western ignorance and arrogance: ignorance about other cultures and arrogance towards them."—Jeremy Coote, Times Literary Supplement"The book is infuriating, entertaining, and inspirational, leaving one feeling less able than before to pass judgment on 'known' genres of art, but feeling more confident for that."—Joel Smith, San Francisco Review of Books"[A] witty, but scholarly, indictment of the whole primitive-art business, from cargo to curator. And because she employs sarcasm as well as pedagogy, Price's book will probably forever deprive the reader of the warm fuzzies he usually gets standing before the display cases at the local ethnographic museum."—Newsweek

    

    This study is the first book to undertake a detailed analysis of Whitman's entire work in relation to the political struggles of the 19th century. Erkkila repairs the split between the private and the public, the personal and the political, the poet and history, that has in the past defined the analysis and evaluation of Whitman's work. Her approach combines close reading and historicist analysis, examining his poems as both products and agents of the political culture of his time. Among the topics explored are the ways in which the politics of race, class, gender, capital, technology, western expansion, and war enter into the poetic design of Leaves of Grass; the relation between Whitman's (homo)sexual body and the body politic of his poems; and the ways in which the Civil War and its aftermath affected Whitman's artistic ordering and reordering of his work.

    A fire in 1985 totally destroyed Andrews's studio, and he painstakingly set about reassembling his photos, which document the history of the flourishing African-American theater from 1957 to 1984. A preface by playwright/director Harrison provides a historical framework for the photos, and the afterword is an interview in which Andrews discusses personal and professional matters. Only a few of these photographs may be great--but taken together, they are a unique record and reveal the awesome variety, vibrancy, and passion of black theater in America. The book is an important addition to material on theater history. Recommended for larger theater and photography collections. - Johanna Ezell, Pennsylvania State Univ. Lib., Mont Alto

    Published in 1989 following critic David Kalstone's death, with the help of a number of his friends and colleagues, it was greeted with uniformly enthusiastic praise. Hailed at that time as "one of the most sensitive appreciations of Elizabeth Bishop's genius ever composed" and "a first-rate piece of criticism" and "a masterpiece of understanding about friendship and about poetry," it has been largely unavailable in recent years.

    "A lively and controversial symposium ... thought-provoking"—The Sunday Times (Paperbacks of the Year, 1989)"The essays are all distinguished by their topicality and lucidity."—MuseumNews"A welcome addition to the library of Museology"—Art Monthly"The New Museology is essential reading for all those seeking to understand the current debate in museum ideologies."—International Journal of Museum Management and Scholarship

    Its early years have understandably received a lot of attention, but, as Nick Browne points out in his introduction to this volume, Cahiers du Cinema published tremendously important articles even after its legendary heyday. The pieces reprinted here, most of them translated into English for the first time, document the changes in French film theory and criticism after the events of May 1968. Between 1969 and 1972, Cahiers du Cinema became a radical Marxist journal. Its contributors interpreted the political ideology of films and filmmaking even as they continued to debate the work of major international directors. Included here are theoretical pieces as well as fresh assessments of films by Sergei Eisenstein, Josef von Sternberg, Luchino Visconti, George Cukor, and many others.

    She reveals unexpected subtleties & coherence, & also shows how the hymns work in combination to provide an over-arching Greek worldview.'This important and ground-breaking book provides a systematic and convincing reading of these four fascinating poems as a group, and in relation to the epics of Homer and the Theogony of Hesiod. Clay's expert and highly original analysis of the poems' narrative and thematic patterns succeeds brilliantly in demonstrating not only the unexpected subtlety and coherence of each Hymn, but also the ways in which they work in combination to provide an over-arching Greek world-view. This is by far the best book that has been written on this important body of poetry.' -- Mark Griffith, University of California, Berkeley'Though controversial in many places, this book is of great value to classicists. Its assumption that the poems have an intellectual and "theological" coherence... is welcome and will benefit those who teach the Hymns.' -- Charles Platter, Classical Outlook

    

    This collection of essays aims to demonstrate the scope and variety of bestiary studies and the ways in which the medieval bestiary can be addressed. The contributors write about the tradition of one of the bestiary's birds, Parisian production of the manuscripts, bestiary animals in a liturgical book, theological as well as secular interpretations of beasts, bestiary creatures in literature, and new perspectives on the bestiary in other genres.

    Although the juxtaposition is not new, comparative studies have tended to view these masters as radically different both as musicians and as musical dramatists. Wagner and his "symphonic opera" set against Verdi "the melodist" is one of many familiar antitheses, and it serves to highlight the particular terms from which comparisons are often made. In this book some of the leading and most innovative music scholars challenge this view, suggesting that as we become more distant from the nineteenth century, we may see that Verdi and Wagner confronted largely similar problems, and even on occasion found similar solutions.But more than this, Analyzing Opera sets out to demonstrate the richness and variety of modern analytical approaches to the genre. As the editors point out in their introduction, today's musical scholars increasingly question the usefulness of organicist theories in analytical studies, and, as they do so, opera seems to become an ever more central area of investigation. Opera is peculiar: its clash of verbal, musical, and visual systems can produce incongruities and extravagant miscalculations. It invites a multiplicity of approaches, challenges orthodoxy, and embraces ambiguity. The sheer variety of essays presented here is witness to this fact and suggests that analyzing opera is one of the liveliest (and most polemical) areas in modern-day musical scholarship.In addition to the editors, the contributors to the volume are Philip Gossett, John Deathridge, James A. Hepokoski, Joseph Kerman, Thomas S. Grey, Matthew Brown, Anthony Newcomb, Martin Chusid, David Lawton, and Patrick McCreless.

    In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written and spoken language and the complex relation between art's contrivances and its moral truths. She has given us an exceptional book that demonstrates the possibilities of literature even as it explores them.

    He calls in evidence literature - Pasternak, Djlias, Solzhenitsyn, and political figures, such as Sakharov, Lenin and Kremlinologists, to form critical theories about the Soviet Union and its writings.