Berghahn Books
The art of the project; projects and experiments in modern French culture.
Twelve contributions from Gratton (Trinity College Dublin), Sheringham (U. of Oxford) and other international academics consider the notion of the literary or artistic "project" in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices. The editors discuss the history, theory, and practice of the art of the project in the introduction. Other contributors examine projects by artists such as Man Ray, André Malraux, and Michel Foucault. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Between two worlds; the Jewish presence in German and Austrian film, 1910-1933.
From the beginning of the silent film era Jews have been well- represented in the industry in virtually every profession attached to celluloid. In the years 1910 through 1933 in Germany, however, Jewish performers, professionals and subjects became increasingly a part of their outside world, and to watch a film with anything to do with Jewish culture or topics from 1915 is to see a different world than that from 1933. Prawer (Oxford U.) carefully traces the effects of that outer world upon the one projected in the dark of the theater, from the melodramas and comedies to the Sittenfilme ("enlightenment film") that followed, to the crash of 1929 that led to ironic realism, confrontations, tense comedies and even tenser musicals. Prawer provides very interesting photographs. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
The body of the queen; gender and rule in the courtly world, 1500-2000.
European and American scholars of history, literature, and art present 15 essays that emerged from a September 2001 conference in Florence. Within themes of constructing the body politic, transgressing the body natural, queens of modernity, and visual metamorphoses, they consider such topics as early self-representations of Elizabeth I when a princess, posterity and the body of the princess in German court funeral books, imperial fashion in the 19th century, and representations of Grace Kelly and Romy Schneider. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Building on water; Venice, Holland, and the construction of the European landscape in early modern times.
The environmental impact of water use and land reclamation from marshland (in the case of Holland) or lagoons (for Venice) are by no means strictly modern concerns. They were the cause of both inspiration and debate from the sixteenth century onward in those socially and economically ambitious landscapes. Ciriacono (modern history, U. of Padua) makes the case that not only did such land reclamation schemes affect agriculture and the growth of cities but also a close relationship between the people and the water upon which they largely dwelt. He covers the relationship between water and agricultural production in the Venetian terra firma in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, irrigation and land drainage and its impact on the Venetian Republic, the study of hydraulics from the fifteenth century to the second scientific revolution, Venice and Holland as amphibious states, and the relationship of land reclamation and water to technology transfer from Holland to Germany, France and England. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Celebrating transgression; method and politics in anthropological studies of culture; a book in honour of Klaus Peter Köpping.
Köpping (anthropology, U. of Heidelberg) uses the metaphor of anthropologist as trickster to highlight how they venture out to engage Otherness, then reconstruct their experience in texts. Colleagues from around the world celebrate his 65th birthday with 15 studies pivoting around the notion. Among their topics are soiled work and the artifact, inheriting forsaken souls in Bali, and the concatenation of minds. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Meaning and representation in history.
Historians, most European, explore both the power of the past over the minds of people in the present, and what features people of the present attribute to the past when they relate themselves to it. Their topics include how meaning came into the world and what became of it, language and historical experience, reinventing tradition between the 18th and 20th centuries, and ruins as a visual expression of historical meaning. Only names are indexed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Women in Polish cinema.
In front of the camera they are mothers, fighters, sinners and civic saints; behind the camera they are filmmakers and critics. Mazierska (cinema, U. of Central Lancashire) and Ostrowka (film, U. of Alberta) describe the unique relationship between women, in flesh and in concept, and Polish film. They take turns describing the significance of women as role models, archetypes and realistic representations, examining the heavily influential myth of the Polish mother, how women appear to men as superwoman, caught between the active and passive in the Polish School, as political heroines, as victims of the crisis in masculinity, and as the "other." They also examine the work of Jakubowska, Sass, Holland and Kedzierzawska as fighters, authors, skeptics and ambivalent feminists. Mazierska and Ostrowka include a filmography and period photographs. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Women in Polish cinema.
With the exception of the opening essay examining the shaping of the Polish mother as a paradigm of femininity in Polish culture as a whole, all of the 11 contributions to this work examining the treatment of women's issues in Polish film from a feminist perspective were penned by either Mazierska (contemporary cinema, U. of Central Lancashire, UK) or Ostrowska (film, U. of Alberta, Canada). The first set of essays is dedicated to analysis of the main types of women represented in Polish films, including the Polish mother, the Stalinist "New Woman," the more individualist characterizations of the 1950s, postcommunist portrayals, and Polish Jewish women. The final four essays in the book focus on women filmmakers, examining the works of Wanda Jakubowksa, Barbara Sass, Agnieszka Holland, and Dorota Kedzierzawska. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
