A Theory of Adaptation


Linda Hutcheon - 2006
    Adaptation, Hutcheon argues, has always been a central mode of the story-telling imagination and deserves to be studied in all its breadth and range as both a process (of creation and reception) and a product unto its own.Persuasive and illuminating, A Theory of Adaptation is a bold rethinking of how adaptation works across all media and genres that may put an end to the age-old question of whether the book was better than the movie, or the opera, or the theme park.

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers


Marina Warner - 1994
    Why are storytellers so often women, and how does that affect the status of fairy tales? Are they a source of wisdom or a misleading temptation to indulge in romancing?

Understanding Movies: The Art and History of Film (The Modern Scholar)


Raphael Shargel - 2008
    It traces the experiments and innovations that gave rise to the modern cinema, developing a vocabulary that helps explain the variety of choices filmmakers make when they construct shots and edit them together. In each lecture, Professor Raphael Shargel introduces a period of film history, talks about its importance, covers aspects of cinematic technique, and illustrates his points by analyzing specific movies from the era under discussion. The course thus has both breadth and depth, covering the major movements in film history while at the same time focusing on key pictures worthy of study and enjoyment. Lecture 1 The Origins of Cinema and the Grammar of FilmLecture 2 Film Imagery and the Theory of MontageLecture 3 Storytelling in the 1930s and StagecoachLecture 4 Citizen Kane: An American MasterpieceLecture 5 World War II and the Cinema of Community: Casablanca; Now, Voyager; and It's a Wonderful LifeLecture 6 Noir and Neorealism: Bicycle Thieves and On the WaterfrontLecture 7 Love and the Mirror of Death: Alfred Hitchcock's VertigoLecture 8 Widescreen: The World Writ Large and Intimate: The ApartmentLecture 9 The New Wave in France: The 400 Blows and Week-endLecture 10 The American New Wave I: Politics and Family: The GodfatherLecture 11 The American New Wave II: The Social Canvas: NashvilleLecture 12 The Rule of the Blockbuster: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost ArkLecture 13 Gender, Race, and the Varieties of Cinematic Experience: Vagabond, Do the Right Thing, and Lone StarLecture 14 The Contemporary Maverick: Goodfellas, Million Dollar Baby, Persepolisfrom www.learnoutloud.com

Welcome to Hell World


Luke O'Neil - 2019
    When he’s awake, he gives vent to some of the most heartfelt, political and anger-fueled prose to power its way to the public sphere since Hunter S. Thompson smashed a typewriter’s keys.Welcome to Hell World is an unexpurgated selection of Luke O’Neil’s finest rants, near-poetic rhapsodies, and investigatory journalism. Racism, sexism, immigration, unemployment, Marcus Aurelius, opioid addiction, Iraq: all are processed through the O’Neil grinder. He details failings in his own life and in those he observes around him: and the result is a book that is at once intensely confessional and an energetic, unforgettable condemnation of American mores.Welcome to Hell World is, in the author’s words, a “fever dream nightmare of reporting and personal essays from one of the lowest periods in our country in recent memory.” It is also a burning example of some of the best writing you’re likely to read anywhere.____________________________________________________________________________"Luke O’Neil is not on staff. " — The Boston Globe"Unbelievable." —Ben Shapiro"The Left’s new low." —Tucker Carlson"A widely read, offbeat newsletter… " —Mike Isaac, The New York Times"Luke O’Neil is one of the few writers who faces our grim reality the way it is, and not the way we wish it was. Compiling Hell World is a sin-eater’s task, and we are indebted to him for doing it.”—Dan Ozzi, co-author of Tranny"One of my favorite things I read all year…” —Frida Garza, Jezebel’s The Best Political Writing 2018"Welcome to Hell World is a distress call from a place where hope still exists, dispatched by a man who clearly sees the insanity of life in America and believes it doesn’t have to be this way.” —Keith Buckley of Every Time I Die, author of Watch"Luke O’Neil is like no other journalist working today, fusing original reporting with memoir and frequently-profane observational humor to create what feels like a new type of truth-telling: precise, fucked-up, infuriating, and, somehow, beautiful. ...This is what it looks like when a gifted writer finds his voice.” —Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack and author of Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales


Maria TatarJoseph Jacobs - 2002
    350 full-color photos, paintings & illustrations.

Manners, Custom And Dress During The Middle Ages And During The Renaissance Period (Forgotten Books)


P.L. Jacob - 1877
    Illustrated with over 400 images. "What an ardent struggle during that long period! and how full, too, of emotion is its picture! Society tends to reconstitute itself in every aspect." Originally published in 1876.

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence


Judith Butler - 2004
    In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.

Morphology of the Folktale


Vladimir Propp - 1928
    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies


Susan Jacoby - 2018
    These include the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, with more political power today than ever before; the failure of public education to create an informed citizenry; the triumph of internet over print culture; and America's toxic addition to infotainment. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation and sparing neither the right nor the left, Susan Jacoby asserts that Americans today have embraced "junk thought" that makes almost no effort to separate fact from opinion.At today's critical political juncture, nothing could be more important than recognizing the crisis described in this impassioned, tough-minded book, which challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what the flights from reason has cost us as individuals and as a nation.

An Askew View: The Films of Kevin Smith


John Kenneth Muir - 2002
    Filmed on a shoestring budget after hours at a convenience store, it was crude (in technique and language), realistic and, above all, hilarious. The movie's nationwide success helped launch the indepedent film boom of the 1990s and catapulted its director, Kevin Smith, to full-fledged stardom. Smith's work is explored in AN ASKEW VIEW, the first ever study of his films. John Kenneth Muir examines all of Smith's movies. including MALLRATS, CHASING AMY, and the hugely controversial and variously interpreted DOGMA. Muir discusses Smith's themes and obsessions in depth: his New Jersey boosterism, the cast of characters that pop in and out of all of his films, and the references to STAR WARS and other icons of pop culture. AN ASKEW VIEW is a fascinating and detailed history of the art of this visionary filmmaker, New Jersey's favorite local-boy-makes-good since Bruce Springsteen.

The Arcades Project


Walter Benjamin - 1982
    In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by "progress," Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

JFK: An American Coup D'Etat: The Truth Behind the Kennedy Assassination


John Hughes-Wilson - 2013
    In America men and women wept openly in the streets for their dead leader. But events soon began to unpick the original version of what happened. It turned out that theaofficial report was little more than a crude government whitewash designed to hide the real truth. Even American Presidents admitted as much. President Nixon memorably confessed in private that the Warren Report was the biggest hoax ever perpetuated on the American public. It began to emerge that maybe Lee Harvey Oswald, the original one nut gunman, may not have acted on his own; others were involved, too. That meant no lone gunman, but a conspiracy. This book attempts to answer the big question: who really shot JFK? And, more important still, exactly why was he shot? John Hughes-Wilson argues that the murder of John Kennedy was, like the murder of Julius Caesar 2,000ayears before, nothing less than a bloody coup dOCO(r)tat by his political enemies, a conspiracy hell bent on removing a leader who was threatening the power and the money of the ruling establishment. Pointing the finger at Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, and the Mafia, John joins Jackie and Bobby Kennedy in their conclusion that the assassination of JFK was far more complex than a deranged attack by Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine."

Inventing the Middle Ages


Norman F. Cantor - 1991
    The medieval world was not simply excavated through systematic research. It had to be conceptually created: It had to be invented, and this is the story of that invention.Norman Cantor focuses on the lives and works of twenty of the great medievalists of this century, demonstrating how the events of their lives, and their spiritual and emotional outlooks, influenced their interpretations of the Middle Ages. Cantor makes their scholarship an intensely personal and passionate exercise, full of color and controversy, displaying the strong personalities and creative minds that brought new insights about the past.A revolution in academic method, this book is a breakthrough to a new way of teaching the humanities and historiography, to be enjoyed by student and general public alike. It takes an immense body of learning and transmits it so that readers come away fully informed of the essentials of the subject, perceiving the interconnection of medieval civilization with the culture of the twentieth century and having had a good time while doing it! This is a riveting, entertaining, humorous, and learned read, compulsory for anyone concerned about the past and future of Western civilization.

Terry Jones' Medieval Lives


Terry Jones - 2004
    and did outlaws never wear trousers?Terry Jones and Alan Ereira are your guides to this most misrepresented and misunderstood period, and they point you to things that will surprise and provoke. Did you know, for example, that medieval people didn't think the world was flat? That was a total fabrication by an American journalist in the 19th century. Did you know that they didn't burn witches in the Middle Ages? That was a refinement of the so-called Renaissance. In fact, medieval kings weren't necessarily merciless tyrants, and peasants entertained at home using French pottery and fine wine. Terry Jones' Medieval Lives reveals Medieval Britain as you have never seen it before - a vibrant society teeming with individuality, intrigue and innovation.

Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story


Thad Komorowski - 2013
    Through vigorous draftsmanship, charismatic voices, irreverent sight gags, crass humor, and stellar character acting, animation's most talented and disturbed artists created an entity for the Nickelodeon cable network that pulled the art form out of a 25-year rut. The world has never been quite the same since - and we're eternally grateful!Now you too can join the rollercoaster ride that is the fascinating, insane real-life story of art, money, and ego that gave birth to Ren Hoek and Stimpson J. Cat. History Eraser Buttons need not apply. No stone has been unturned, no magic nose goblins unpicked, in this extensively detailed history of the show that defined a generation and changed an entire medium.It's everything you wanted to know about Ren & Stimpy - but were afraid to ask!