Editions Rodopi
The Matrix in theory.
This volume probes the relationship between the cinematic Matrix trilogy and critical theory, exploring both theoretical approaches to the movies and the use of theory within the movies themselves. Diocaretz (founder & general editor, Critical Studies) and Herbrechter (cultural analysis, U. of Leeds). Papers provide critical readings of the films, discuss the cultural context of the films in an effort to understand their popularity, and analyze the logic of consumption contained within video game version of the first movie. Others, presented under the label "virtualities," consider the philosophical themes of the films, explore the meanings of references to Baudrillard, and the film as an answer to the problems raised by the notion of the virtual. Later essays interrogate the films' presentation of essentialist racial divisions of reproductive labor, questions of embodiment latent in the films, and gender and sexuality in "cyberfiction." Concluding chapters explore emancipatory and posthuman aspects of the Matrix, discuss connections between cultural posthumanism to earlier forms of materialist and poststructuralist critique, and investigate and critique the academic canonicity of the Matrix. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Neue sachlichkeit 1918-33; unity and diversity of an art movement.
They were called Neue Sachlichkeit, "New Objectivity," but they seemed too far apart in their ideas to really be called a movement. They may have lived in turbulence in the Weimar Republic, and they tended to produce hard outlines, caricatures and commentary on urban life, but otherwise remained largely undefined. However, according to cultural historian Plumb, they may have had distinct differences but they also were informed by specific themes and were unified in their imaging of the world. Plumb explores the diversity of the movement in its aims, influences and devices, and places them in their historical context and their location within Weimar and post-Great War culture. He also considers the rise of a new culture, that of nazism, and how it rather quickly and completely destroyed the new objectivity. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
On verbal/visual representation; word & image interactions, 4.
The essays here are selected from papers given at the Fifth International Conference on Word and Image Studies held March 1999. Categories include art, criticism and taste with such topics as art history and hermeneutics, Fromentin, French criticism in 1855, the role of the press in the emergence of public space, and art criticism and its relation to art institutions. Those on books, book illustration and typography include various treatments of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, McCaffery's Carnival, the work of Pierre Lecuire, and pre-modern Japanese word and image text. The issue of cultural crossing is covered by papers on the iconic turn, Deleuze, popular visual images in Japan, and the landscape of Albert Bierstadt and James Fenimore Cooper. Five essays grace the category of border crossing, including one on graffiti, and those on theory include a paper on the digital cultural heritage. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Picturing mind; paradox, indeterminacy and consciousness in art & poetry.
Artist and writer Danvers (U. of Plymouth, Britain) interweaves ideas about practices in art and poetry with reflections on philosophies of art and poetics in order to outline a particular topography of mind, a particular way of picturing and thinking about the world. Many of his illustrations, he warns, serve as counterpoises to what the text is saying, and are uncaptioned because, well, that would rather defeat the point. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Tropes for the past; Hayden White and the history/literature debate.
Although tensions have not approached full-scale war yet, the debate between literature and historiography in the guise of debate between the empiricists and the postmodernists continues to run hot. In these articles contributors go through the work of Hayden White to consider narrative, literature as history and history as literature in such topics as historical discourse and literary writing, ironic battles against irony, history and textuality in film, the growth to narrative of film, the collected object, personal histories and constructed memory, persuasion in the historical writing of the past two centuries, representatives of the modern event itself and divergence and confidence in mapping the streams of Hiroshima. Papers were inspired in the conference "Literature and Its Others" held 8-10 May 2003. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Vampires; myths and metaphors of enduring evil.
Taking the interdisciplinary principle to its extreme by refusing to identify theirs, contributors hunt the meaning of vampires from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice. Among their topics are desire, subjectivity, and the threat of the abject in Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla; the discourse of the vampire in World War I writing; vampire dogs and marsupial hyenas in light of the Tasmanian tiger's extinction; vampire imagery and the law; and the vampire body and the meaning of mutilation. The volume is part of the research project Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. It is not indexed. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
Writing and seeing; essays on word and image.
A result of a project conference of the same name held in October 2004, these 31 essays describe the encounters between word and image, the visual and the verbal in a variety of media, defined by that relation within certain cultural and communication contexts. The essays are interdisciplinary and describe the challenges of representation, representations and appropriations in early modern to modern works, such as the figure of Venus in Spenser, Shakespeare and Titian, crossing images and changing places, including a reading of Michel Butor's La Modification as an emblematic icon-text, portraits and the ambivalent narrative of A.S. Byatt, lens and print, stage and screen from eastern and western contexts, straying narratives, composite skills, and the long perspective. Particularly interesting is an essay by Yoko Ono on the influence of shojo manga on contemporary Japanese women's writing. (Annotation ©2007 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)
