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In this pioneering book, Negar Mottahedeh explores the central issues of vision and visibility in Iranian culture. She focuses on historical and literary texts to understand the use of visual culture and performance traditions in the production of the contemporary nation. Tracing the historical mediation and dissemination of ideas for national reform in the modern period of Iran, the book examines the various discourses that have constituted the image of the unpresentable “Babi” as the figure of Iran’s Other. In her exploration of gender and Iranian cinema, the author powerfully argues that this unpresentable image continues to haunt contemporary Iranian cinema’s representations of the nation. As cinema began to displace other forms of representation in Iran, Islamic culture attempted to keep the motion picture industry free from what it perceived to be the taint of foreign values and intervention. With insight and detail, Mottahedeh looks at the revealing ways in which contemporary Iranian cinema has dealt with representing an unpresentable national modernity articulated through traversals in time and space. These deeply national tropes of traversal shaped the image of the “Babi,” against which nineteenth-century Iran produced its own modernity. This highly original work, signaling a paradigmatic shift in Iranian studies and gender studies, will be an invaluable resource for scholars in cultural, Iranian, or film studies.
Borders separate but also connect self and other, and literary texts not only enact these bordering processes, but form part of such processes. This book gestures towards a borderless world, stepping, as it were, with thousand-mile boots from south to north (even across the Atlantic), from South Africa to Scandinavia. It also shows how literary texts model and remodel borders and bordering processes in rich and meaningful local contexts. The essays assembled here analyse the crossing and negotiation of borders and boundaries in works by Nadine Gordimer, Ingrid Winterbach, Deneys Reitz, Janet Suzman, Marlene van Niekerk, A.S. Byatt, Thomas Harris, Frank A. Jenssen, Eben Venter, Antjie Krog, and others under different signs or conceptual points of attraction. These signs include a spiritual turn, eventfulness, self-understanding, ethnic and linguistic mobilization, performative chronotopes, the grotesque, the carceral, the rhetorical, and the interstitial. Contributors: Ileana Dimitriu, Heilna du Plooy, John Gouws, Anne Heith, Lida Krüger, Susan Meyer, Adéle Nel, Ellen Rees, Johan Schimanski, Tony Ullyatt, Phil van Schalkwyk, Hein Viljoen.
From the gouging out of eyes in Shakespeare's King Lear or Sarah Kane's Cleansed, to the adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, theatre has long been intrigued by the staging of challenging plays and impossible texts, images or ideas. Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure examines this phenomenon of what the theatre cannot do or has not been able to do at various points in its history. The book explores four principal areas to which unstageability most frequently pertains: stage directions, adaptations, violence and ghosts. Karen Quigley incorporates a wide range of case studies of both historical and contemporary theatrical productions including the Wooster Group's exploration of Hamlet via the structural frame of John Gielgud's 1964 filmed production, Elevator Repair Service's eight-hour staging of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and a selection of impossible stage directions drawn from works by such playwrights as Eugene O'Neill, Philip Glass, Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Alistair McDowall. Placing theatre history and performance analysis in such a context, Performing the Unstageable values what is not possible, and investigates the tricky underside of theatre's most fundamental function to bring things to the place of showing: the stage.
Atrocity presents a problem to the writer of children's literature. To represent events of such terrible magnitude and impersonal will as the Holocaust, the transatlantic slave trade, or the Rwandan genocide such that they fit into a three-act structure with a comprehensible moral and a happy ending is to do a disservice to the victims. Yet to confront children with the fact of widescale violence without resolution is to confront them with realities that may be emotionally disturbing and even damaging. Despite these challenges, however, there exists a considerable body of work for and about children that addresses atrocity. To examine the ways in which writers and artists have attempted to address children's experience of atrocity, this collection brings together original essays by an international group of scholars working in the fields of child studies, children's literature, comics studies, education, English literature, and Holocaust, genocide, and memory studies. It covers a broad geographical range and includes works by established authors and emerging voices.
The book attempts, for the first time, to demonstrate a vital connection between Thomas’s poetry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This will benefit readers by helping shed new and illuminating light on the writing and will help close the gap that sadly still exists between Thomas’s critical and popular receptions. Close textual analysis of poems that have to date received only scant critical attention e.g. ‘Today this insect’ The Notebooks have received only scant critical attention, and have been subordinated to a purely minor role. Here, however the Notebooks are re-visited and re-evaluated, because the text of these four manuscript exercise books, provides us with a highly significant and revealing document.
Over the past twenty-five years the relationship between art and advertising has become increasingly varied and complex, with artists appropriating the billboards and neon displays of the ad world, and advertising strategies borrowing both the tactics and imagery of contemporary art. This wide-ranging book charts key points of contact, overlap and exchange between the two fields. Joan Gibbons looks at the work of a number of artists from Barbara Kruger, Les Levine and Victor Burgin though to Sylvie Fleurie and Swetlana Heger and at cutting edge advertising campaigns including Benson's Silk Cut, Benetton's Shock of Reality and US agency Wieden and Kennedy's work for Nike. She discusses too the various collaborations and crossovers between art and advertising: the work of artist, director and creative Tony Kaye; adman turned collector Charles Saatchi and the issues of celebrity and branding that surround him; and the endorsement of art by highly branded products such as Absolut Vodka, to show that art and advertising are more mutually enriching than ever.
What is 'deconstruction'? What authors are considered 'postmodern novelists'? The Routledge Companion to Postmodernismcombines a series of fourteen in-depth background chapters with a body of A-Z entries to create an authoritative, yet readable guide to the complex world of postmodernism. Following full-length articles on postmodernism and philosophy, politics, feminism, lifestyles, television, and other postmodern essentials, readers will find a wide range of alphabetically-organized entries on the people, terms and theories connected with postmodernism, including: Peter Ackroyd; Jean Baudrillard; Chaos Theory; Death of the Author; Desire; Fractals; Michel Foucault; Frankfurt School; Generation X; Minimalism; Poststructuralism; Retro; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; and Trans-avant-garde. Students interested in any aspect of postmodernist thought will find this an indispensable resource.
Following Lyotard's death in 1998, this book provides an exploration of the recurrent theme of education in his work. It brings to a wider audience the significance of a body of thought about education that is subtle, profound and still largely unexplored. This book also makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on postmoderism and education.
The last two decades of the twentieth century have been marked by an immense revival of interest in the sublime. The sublime has been periodized (and "trans-periodized"), gendered, politicized, and even made into a commodity with specific social and economic effects. Yet past studies have used Western texts as their archives. This book dramatically shifts the focus by examining a major instance of a non-Western sublime: the Hindu Brahman. Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime examines European theories of the sublime, reads them off against contemporary critical uses of the term (notably by Lyotard and Paul de Man), and proposes that the Hindu Brahman constitutes an instance of one of the most fully developed of all sublimes. Mishra argues that the negative aesthetics of Brahman (and the largely decentered rhetoric of Hinduism generally) is part of this massive culture's use of the category of the sublime (and not the beautiful) to speak about a moment when the mind is confronted with an idea too large to be presented to consciousness. The book then examines the case of one of India's dominant literary genres—devotional verse—to show that once the category of the sublime is grasped (or seen as the undertheorized category of Indian aesthetics), it soon becomes clear that this massive genre is also predicated upon Brahman, the Absolute, as the sublime object of (impossible) desire. It is the first book to offer a comprehensive theory of both the Indian sublime and Indian devotional verse.