Crossmappings
On Visual Culture
Published on 22. May 2018
Book
Hardback
432 pages
978-1-78831-107-6 (ISBN)
Description
The great, influential cultural critic, Elisabeth Bronfen, sets out in this book a conversation between literature, cinema and visual culture. The crossmappings facilitated in and between these essays address the cultural survival of image formulas involving portraiture and the uncanny relation between the body and its visual representability, the gendering of war, death and the fragility of life, as well as sovereignty and political power. Each chapter tracks transformations that occur as aesthetic figurations travel from one historical moment to another, but also from one medium to another. Many prominent artists are discussed during these journeys into the cultural imaginary, include Degas, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Wagner, Picasso, and Shakespeare, as well as classic Hollywood's film noir and melodrama and the TV series, The Wire and House of Cards.
Reviews / Votes
Brilliant essays on the female nude, on images not just of chess games but of chess queens in recent film and television ... full of marvelous and disturbing ideas ... Summing Up: Recommended. * CHOICE * This is a very important, relevant book for today's world. Bronfen is one of the very rare scholars who, in accessible prose, offers in-depth analyses of the interactions between "high" art and "popular" visual culture, focusing on the socio-political relevance of that crossover. Analysing literature, cinema, television series and other works of popular fiction, from present to past and back, Bronfen is a brilliant "image-thinker", and so makes a strong case for the urgent necessity of the Humanities in today's world. * Mieke Bal, Independent scholar affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and video artist *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
59 bw illus
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
1046 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78831-107-6 (9781788311076)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
05/2018
1st Edition
I.B. Tauris
€29.99
Available for download
Persons
Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and, since 2007, Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is a specialist in nineteenth and twentieth-century literature and her books in psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture include Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic; The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents; Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature and Film; Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema, and Mad Men, Death and the American Dream.
Content
Introduction. Crossmappings. Visual Readings as a Critical Intervention in the Cultural Imaginary
Part I. Travelling Image Formulas
Chapter 1. Facing Defacement. Degas' Portraits of Women
Chapter 2. Naked Touch. Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude
Chapter 3. Leaving an Imprint. Francesca Woodman's Photographic tableaux vivants
Chapter 4. Pop Cinema. Hollywood's Critical Engagement with America's Culture of Consumption
Chapter 5. Hitler Goes Pop. Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment
Chapter 6. Simulations of the Real. Paul McCarthy's Performance Disasters
Chapter 7. Wagner's Isolde in Hollywood
Chapter 8. Shakespeare's Wire
Chapter 9. Queen of Chess. On Serial Reading
Part II: Gendering the Uncanny, Imaging Death
Chapter 10. The Horror of the Familiar. Freud's Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny
Chapter 11. Gendering Curiosity. The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle
Chapter 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical Performance
Chapter 13. Eva Hesse's Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double
Chapter 14. Wounds of Wonder. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki
Chapter 15. The Fragility of the Quotidien. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Work with Death
Chapter 16. Picasso's War Women
Chapter 17. Contending with the Father. Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation
Notes
Index
Part I. Travelling Image Formulas
Chapter 1. Facing Defacement. Degas' Portraits of Women
Chapter 2. Naked Touch. Disfiguration, Recognition and the Female Nude
Chapter 3. Leaving an Imprint. Francesca Woodman's Photographic tableaux vivants
Chapter 4. Pop Cinema. Hollywood's Critical Engagement with America's Culture of Consumption
Chapter 5. Hitler Goes Pop. Totalitarianism, Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Hollywood Entertainment
Chapter 6. Simulations of the Real. Paul McCarthy's Performance Disasters
Chapter 7. Wagner's Isolde in Hollywood
Chapter 8. Shakespeare's Wire
Chapter 9. Queen of Chess. On Serial Reading
Part II: Gendering the Uncanny, Imaging Death
Chapter 10. The Horror of the Familiar. Freud's Thoughts on Femininity and the Uncanny
Chapter 11. Gendering Curiosity. The Double Games of Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster and Sophie Calle
Chapter 12. The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman's Hysterical Performance
Chapter 13. Eva Hesse's Spectral Bride and her Uncanny Double
Chapter 14. Wounds of Wonder. Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, Nabuyoshi Araki
Chapter 15. The Fragility of the Quotidien. Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Work with Death
Chapter 16. Picasso's War Women
Chapter 17. Contending with the Father. Louise Bourgeois and her Aesthetics of Reparation
Notes
Index