Lisa Stead
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780748694884
- eISBN:
- 9781474426701
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694884.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain offers a rich new exploration of interwar women’s fictions and their complex intersections with cinema. ...
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Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain offers a rich new exploration of interwar women’s fictions and their complex intersections with cinema. Interrogating a range of writings, from newspapers and magazines to middlebrow and modernist fictions, the book takes the reader through the diverse print and storytelling media that women constructed around interwar film-going, arguing that literary forms came to constitute an intermedial gendered cinema culture at this time. Using detailed case studies, this innovative book draws upon new archival research, industrial analysis and close textual readings to consider cinema’s place in the fictions and critical writings of major literary figures such as Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A. Lejeune and Iris Barry. Through the lens of feminist film historiography, Off to the Pictures presents a bold new view of interwar cinema culture, read through the creative reflections of the women who experienced it.Less
Off to the Pictures: Cinemagoing, Women’s Writing and Movie Culture in Interwar Britain offers a rich new exploration of interwar women’s fictions and their complex intersections with cinema. Interrogating a range of writings, from newspapers and magazines to middlebrow and modernist fictions, the book takes the reader through the diverse print and storytelling media that women constructed around interwar film-going, arguing that literary forms came to constitute an intermedial gendered cinema culture at this time. Using detailed case studies, this innovative book draws upon new archival research, industrial analysis and close textual readings to consider cinema’s place in the fictions and critical writings of major literary figures such as Winifred Holtby, Stella Gibbons, Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Elinor Glyn, C. A. Lejeune and Iris Barry. Through the lens of feminist film historiography, Off to the Pictures presents a bold new view of interwar cinema culture, read through the creative reflections of the women who experienced it.
Sozita Goudouna
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474421645
- eISBN:
- 9781474444927
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474421645.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage ...
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Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.Less
Samuel Beckett, one of the most prominent playwrights of the twentieth century, wrote a thirty-second playlet for the stage that does not include actors, text, characters or drama but only stage directions. Breath (1969) is the focus and the only theatrical text examined in this study, which demonstrates how the piece became emblematic of the interdisciplinary exchanges that occur in Beckett's later writings, and of the cross-fertilisation of the theatre with the visual arts. The book attends to fifty breath-related artworks (including sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, performance art) and contextualises Beckett's Breath within the intermedial and high-modernist discourse thereby contributing to the expanding field of intermedial Beckett criticism.
Alexandra Becquet
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. ...
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This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. While Impressionism is first shown as a fitting aesthetics to present the individual’s shattering experience of Armageddon through its subjective perception, the tetralogy’s sights and sounds are then studied for their translation into the text’s fabric and as they appeal to the readers’ senses and memory to immerse them into the narrative. The readers are indeed to synthesize a text stamped by the time-shift, an agent of both fragmentation and composition which relies on memory and on principles operating in music thus revealing the musical structure of Ford’s work. By means of the arts, Parade’s End exposes the trauma engendered by the war to transfer it onto its readers as the design of Ford’s intermedial composition depends on it.Less
This chapter examines the intermedial structure of Parade’s End, considering it as an art composition and Ford’s approach to ‘reflect’ and ‘reflect on’ the traumatic experience of the Great War. While Impressionism is first shown as a fitting aesthetics to present the individual’s shattering experience of Armageddon through its subjective perception, the tetralogy’s sights and sounds are then studied for their translation into the text’s fabric and as they appeal to the readers’ senses and memory to immerse them into the narrative. The readers are indeed to synthesize a text stamped by the time-shift, an agent of both fragmentation and composition which relies on memory and on principles operating in music thus revealing the musical structure of Ford’s work. By means of the arts, Parade’s End exposes the trauma engendered by the war to transfer it onto its readers as the design of Ford’s intermedial composition depends on it.
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- May 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199584581
- eISBN:
- 9780191725159
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584581.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Chapter 5 investigates how specimens were deployed in displays, how the specimens were re-assembled, how morbid anatomists arranged them in cases and on shelves. We find that they were re-integrated ...
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Chapter 5 investigates how specimens were deployed in displays, how the specimens were re-assembled, how morbid anatomists arranged them in cases and on shelves. We find that they were re-integrated to form a physical map of disease—no longer an individual person but a dividual body. Or rather, bodies: the healthy body contrasted with the different ways in which parts of it became diseased; the human body compared to the animals (most collections included an element of comparative anatomy); and the corroding, discoloured,organic body in the shadow of the ideal perfection of the wax model or clinical illustration. Paper, wax, and text formed a series of overlapping, intermedial systems that buttressed the organic morbid body.Less
Chapter 5 investigates how specimens were deployed in displays, how the specimens were re-assembled, how morbid anatomists arranged them in cases and on shelves. We find that they were re-integrated to form a physical map of disease—no longer an individual person but a dividual body. Or rather, bodies: the healthy body contrasted with the different ways in which parts of it became diseased; the human body compared to the animals (most collections included an element of comparative anatomy); and the corroding, discoloured,organic body in the shadow of the ideal perfection of the wax model or clinical illustration. Paper, wax, and text formed a series of overlapping, intermedial systems that buttressed the organic morbid body.
Weihong Bao
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816681334
- eISBN:
- 9781452950655
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816681334.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a ...
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Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.Less
Cinema in modern China was a dynamic entity, not strictly tied to one media technology, one mode of operation, or one system of aesthetic code. It was, in Weihong Bao’s term, an affective medium, a distinct notion of the medium as mediating environment with the power to stir passions, frame perception, and mold experience. In Fiery Cinema, Bao traces the permutations of this affective medium from the early through the mid-twentieth century, exploring its role in aesthetics, politics, and social institutions. Mapping the changing identity of cinema in China in relation to Republican-era print media, theatrical performance, radio broadcasting, television, and architecture, Bao has created an archaeology of Chinese media culture. Within this context, she grounds the question of spectatorial affect and media technology in China’s experience of mechanized warfare, colonial modernity, and the shaping of the public into consumers, national citizens, and a revolutionary collective subject. Carrying on a close conversation with transnational media theory and history, she teases out the tension and affinity between vernacular, political modernist, and propagandistic articulations of mass culture in China’s varied participation in modernity. Fiery Cinema advances a radical rethinking of affect and medium as a key insight into the relationship of cinema to the public sphere and the making of the masses. By centering media politics in her inquiry of the forgotten future of cinema, Bao makes a major intervention into the theory and history of media.
Casie Hermansson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474413565
- eISBN:
- 9781474460088
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474413565.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Children’s metafictions have their roots in literacy pedagogy and entertainment, and remain enormously popular both with authors, readers, and teachers. But they pose a number of unique challenges to ...
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Children’s metafictions have their roots in literacy pedagogy and entertainment, and remain enormously popular both with authors, readers, and teachers. But they pose a number of unique challenges to screen adaptation. While – arguably – audiences of children’s adaptations prefer that the adaptation adhere to the source as closely as possible, in the case of metafiction its defining ‘meta’ element does not directly transmediate. Yet a more direct filmic equivalence for metafiction – metafilm – reflects filmicity rather than bookishness.
This book studies first what children’s metafiction purports to be and to do for the youth reader (infants to young adults). The second chapter examines the distinctive challenges in adapting children’s metafiction to film. The third chapter presents a number of children’s films, adaptations and not, featuring ‘bookish’ themes, characters, settings, and symbols, and develops a ‘film grammar’ for how these are traditionally depicted. The fourth chapter discusses children’s metafilm and draws from a selection of these films. The final, fifth, chapter presents a sub-type of children’s metafilm adaptations which ‘break the fifth wall’ by reflexively focusing not on a single medium (literature or film) but rather on the adaptation processes themselves. These adaptations are meta-adaptations.
The book contains over fifty film stills and a glossary of terms. It discusses works like Inkheart, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the Harry Potter series and the Series of Unfortunate Events. It is grounded in and contributes to contemporary adaptation criticism and theory.Less
Children’s metafictions have their roots in literacy pedagogy and entertainment, and remain enormously popular both with authors, readers, and teachers. But they pose a number of unique challenges to screen adaptation. While – arguably – audiences of children’s adaptations prefer that the adaptation adhere to the source as closely as possible, in the case of metafiction its defining ‘meta’ element does not directly transmediate. Yet a more direct filmic equivalence for metafiction – metafilm – reflects filmicity rather than bookishness.
This book studies first what children’s metafiction purports to be and to do for the youth reader (infants to young adults). The second chapter examines the distinctive challenges in adapting children’s metafiction to film. The third chapter presents a number of children’s films, adaptations and not, featuring ‘bookish’ themes, characters, settings, and symbols, and develops a ‘film grammar’ for how these are traditionally depicted. The fourth chapter discusses children’s metafilm and draws from a selection of these films. The final, fifth, chapter presents a sub-type of children’s metafilm adaptations which ‘break the fifth wall’ by reflexively focusing not on a single medium (literature or film) but rather on the adaptation processes themselves. These adaptations are meta-adaptations.
The book contains over fifty film stills and a glossary of terms. It discusses works like Inkheart, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and the Harry Potter series and the Series of Unfortunate Events. It is grounded in and contributes to contemporary adaptation criticism and theory.
Marion Schmid
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781474410632
- eISBN:
- 9781474464741
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474410632.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's ...
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Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts. Traversing the fields of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and photography, and drawing on André Bazin alongside recent theories of intermediality, it investigates the 'impure', intermedial aesthetics of New Wave cinema. Filmmakers under discussion include critics-turned-directors François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, members of the Left Bank Group Alain Resnais, AgnèsVarda and Chris Marker, but also lesser-known directors, notably the 'secret child of the New Wave', Guy Gilles. This wide-ranging book offers an original reading of the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice.Less
Casting fresh light on one of the most important movements in film history, Intermedial Dialogues: The French New Wave and the Other Arts is the first comprehensive study of the New Wave's relationship with the older arts. Traversing the fields of literature, theatre, painting, architecture and photography, and drawing on André Bazin alongside recent theories of intermediality, it investigates the 'impure', intermedial aesthetics of New Wave cinema. Filmmakers under discussion include critics-turned-directors François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, members of the Left Bank Group Alain Resnais, AgnèsVarda and Chris Marker, but also lesser-known directors, notably the 'secret child of the New Wave', Guy Gilles. This wide-ranging book offers an original reading of the complex, often ambivalent ways in which the New Wave engages the other arts in both its discursive construction and filmic practice.
Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676118
- eISBN:
- 9780748695096
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676118.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, interact both with previous or outmoded media and with ...
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In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, interact both with previous or outmoded media and with what we now refer to as New Media? This collection addresses these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions, and diverse forms of entertainment, exploring these sometimes parallel and sometimes more densely intertwined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with, and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing, and thinking both before and after the ‘birth’ of cinema. Contributors examine the interrelations between cinema, literature, painting, photography, and gaming, not only to each other, but amid a host of other minor and major media such as the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone, and the computer. Each chapter provides insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics.Less
In a world where change has become the only constant, how does the perpetually new relate to the old? How does cinema, itself once a new medium, interact both with previous or outmoded media and with what we now refer to as New Media? This collection addresses these questions by focusing on the relations of cinema to other media, cultural productions, and diverse forms of entertainment, exploring these sometimes parallel and sometimes more densely intertwined histories. Cinematicity in Media History makes visible the complex ways in which media anticipate, interfere with, and draw on one other, demonstrating how cinematicity makes itself felt in practices of seeing, reading, writing, and thinking both before and after the ‘birth’ of cinema. Contributors examine the interrelations between cinema, literature, painting, photography, and gaming, not only to each other, but amid a host of other minor and major media such as the magic lantern, the zoetrope, the flick-book, the iPhone, and the computer. Each chapter provides insights into the development of media and their overlapping technologies and aesthetics.
Mary Simonson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199898015
- eISBN:
- 9780199369683
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199898015.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, History, American
In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded ...
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In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, silent film, and more. Onstage and on-screen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. This book examines these performances and the performers behind them, focusing particularly on the ways in which they negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues, including technological developments and commodification, new modes of perception, evolving understandings of the body and the self, and shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.Less
In the early twentieth century, female performers regularly appeared on the stages and screens of American cities. Though advertised as dancers, mimics, singers, or actresses, they often exceeded these categories. Instead, their performances adopted an aesthetic of intermediality, weaving together techniques and elements drawn from a wide variety of genres and media, including ballet, art music, photography, early modern dance, vaudeville traditions, silent film, and more. Onstage and on-screen, performers borrowed from existing musical scores and narratives, referred to contemporary shows, films, and events, and mimicked fellow performers, skating neatly across various media, art forms, and traditions. The performances and conceptions of art that emerged were innovative, compelling, and deeply meaningful. This book examines these performances and the performers behind them, focusing particularly on the ways in which they negotiated turn-of-the-century American social and cultural issues, including technological developments and commodification, new modes of perception, evolving understandings of the body and the self, and shifting conceptions of gender, race, and sexual identity. Tracing the various modes of intermediality at work on- and offstage, Body Knowledge re-imagines early twentieth-century art and entertainment as both fluid and convergent.
Mary Simonson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199898015
- eISBN:
- 9780199369683
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199898015.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, History, American
In 1914, impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. bought a number from J. Leubrie Hill’s black-cast musical, My Friend from Kentucky (also known as Darktown Follies), and restaged it with his own white ...
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In 1914, impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. bought a number from J. Leubrie Hill’s black-cast musical, My Friend from Kentucky (also known as Darktown Follies), and restaged it with his own white dancers in the Follies of 1914. Though the number’s migration has often been read as financially sanctioned minstrelsy, this chapter employs the phenomenon, and revue aesthetics more generally, as a starting point for consideration of intermediality as an early twentieth-century aesthetic. Typically associated with digital art and new media, the concept of intermediality aligns with turn-of-the-century artistic practices: performances staged media interactions through various texts, and also exchanged performers, practices, and personnel across medial boundaries. This chapter positions intermediality within a historical and theoretical framework, and in relation to existing scholarship on performance.Less
In 1914, impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. bought a number from J. Leubrie Hill’s black-cast musical, My Friend from Kentucky (also known as Darktown Follies), and restaged it with his own white dancers in the Follies of 1914. Though the number’s migration has often been read as financially sanctioned minstrelsy, this chapter employs the phenomenon, and revue aesthetics more generally, as a starting point for consideration of intermediality as an early twentieth-century aesthetic. Typically associated with digital art and new media, the concept of intermediality aligns with turn-of-the-century artistic practices: performances staged media interactions through various texts, and also exchanged performers, practices, and personnel across medial boundaries. This chapter positions intermediality within a historical and theoretical framework, and in relation to existing scholarship on performance.
Mary Simonson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199898015
- eISBN:
- 9780199369683
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199898015.003.0002
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, History, American
In the years surrounding the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House, American vaudeville, dance, and film was flooded with Salome dancers of all stripes. This chapter ...
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In the years surrounding the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House, American vaudeville, dance, and film was flooded with Salome dancers of all stripes. This chapter explores a set of operatic and popular performances by Gertrude Hoffman, Bianca Froelich, Aida Overton Walker, and Mary Garden, among others. Emerging at the juncture of theatrical and operatic traditions, these Salomes entangle the working class with the elite, entertainment with uplift, naughtiness with promises of purity, power and emancipation with misogyny. The intermedial network of Salome performers that resulted enabled female performers to construct their own unique “visions” of both the character and her dance; these visions simultaneously reflected and helped to define American cultural shifts, anxieties, and tastes, particularly in relation to gender and class roles and the evolving trope(s) of the “New Woman.”Less
In the years surrounding the premiere of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Metropolitan Opera House, American vaudeville, dance, and film was flooded with Salome dancers of all stripes. This chapter explores a set of operatic and popular performances by Gertrude Hoffman, Bianca Froelich, Aida Overton Walker, and Mary Garden, among others. Emerging at the juncture of theatrical and operatic traditions, these Salomes entangle the working class with the elite, entertainment with uplift, naughtiness with promises of purity, power and emancipation with misogyny. The intermedial network of Salome performers that resulted enabled female performers to construct their own unique “visions” of both the character and her dance; these visions simultaneously reflected and helped to define American cultural shifts, anxieties, and tastes, particularly in relation to gender and class roles and the evolving trope(s) of the “New Woman.”
Mary Simonson
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199898015
- eISBN:
- 9780199369683
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199898015.003.0004
- Subject:
- Music, Dance, History, American
Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) is frequently described as a maverick whose unconventional, improvisatory movement aesthetic helped to establish and shape American modern dance. Yet Duncan’s dances and ...
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Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) is frequently described as a maverick whose unconventional, improvisatory movement aesthetic helped to establish and shape American modern dance. Yet Duncan’s dances and conceptions of art were heavily influenced by Richard Wagner. Dancing to excerpts of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, quoting and referencing his artistic theories in her own speech “The Dance of the Future,” and relating tales of her summer at Bayreuth, Duncan staged an intermedial interrogation of Wagner’s works and ideas. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan’s American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth-century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan’s intermedial performances knit together music and dance, but also join strands of Wagnerism and Victorian ideologies with early modernist aesthetics.Less
Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) is frequently described as a maverick whose unconventional, improvisatory movement aesthetic helped to establish and shape American modern dance. Yet Duncan’s dances and conceptions of art were heavily influenced by Richard Wagner. Dancing to excerpts of Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde, quoting and referencing his artistic theories in her own speech “The Dance of the Future,” and relating tales of her summer at Bayreuth, Duncan staged an intermedial interrogation of Wagner’s works and ideas. The American Wagner cult has long been associated with the Gilded Age and conductor Anton Seidl (1850–1898). Isadora Duncan’s American performances demonstrate that American Wagnerism persisted well into the twentieth-century, albeit in a different form. Conjuring herself as a rebellious disciple of Wagner, Duncan’s intermedial performances knit together music and dance, but also join strands of Wagnerism and Victorian ideologies with early modernist aesthetics.
Ryan Bishop
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748643073
- eISBN:
- 9780748689071
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643073.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this ...
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Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this auto-technological or auto-medial training, allowing audiences to glimpse the many ways they were being conditioned and articulated in the mechanical era by this quintessential example of art form become industry. Comic cinema then considers through its own medial relations to the construction of human perception and consciousness (or aesthetics). Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film adds to the conversation of film comedy in two primary, interrelated ways. One is it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means for staging (or attempting) cultural criticism. Another focuses on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture emergent in the 20th century that cinema helped generate, foster, and question. As a result, comedic film often addresses technology (industrial, mechanical, visual, digital, military, etc.) and techne generally that constitute the grounds of possibility for cinema itself that fall into its purview of self-reflexive cultural criticism. Cinema becomes an important site for producing and critiquing visual technology within US and global cultural politics, examining the status of the mechanically-produced and reproduced moving image, and the thematizing of its own power. In so doing, cinema simultaneously represents itself as a unique medium that is also part of a larger trajectory of visual and audiovisual technologies that have contributed not only to cinema’s formation but also created media environment in which it must function.Less
Cinema mostly taught viewers how to understand cinema, constantly thematizing its addresses to and relationship to its audience. Comic cinema has provided a self-reflexive critique of this auto-technological or auto-medial training, allowing audiences to glimpse the many ways they were being conditioned and articulated in the mechanical era by this quintessential example of art form become industry. Comic cinema then considers through its own medial relations to the construction of human perception and consciousness (or aesthetics). Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film adds to the conversation of film comedy in two primary, interrelated ways. One is it argues for the centrality of comedy in film as a means for staging (or attempting) cultural criticism. Another focuses on the powerful and sustained shifts in visual culture emergent in the 20th century that cinema helped generate, foster, and question. As a result, comedic film often addresses technology (industrial, mechanical, visual, digital, military, etc.) and techne generally that constitute the grounds of possibility for cinema itself that fall into its purview of self-reflexive cultural criticism. Cinema becomes an important site for producing and critiquing visual technology within US and global cultural politics, examining the status of the mechanically-produced and reproduced moving image, and the thematizing of its own power. In so doing, cinema simultaneously represents itself as a unique medium that is also part of a larger trajectory of visual and audiovisual technologies that have contributed not only to cinema’s formation but also created media environment in which it must function.
Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676118
- eISBN:
- 9780748695096
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676118.003.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The Introduction defines ‘cinematicity’ and provides a brief lineage of the term. It engages the idea that media inevitably bear each other’s traces, and that no medium may exhaustively be studied in ...
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The Introduction defines ‘cinematicity’ and provides a brief lineage of the term. It engages the idea that media inevitably bear each other’s traces, and that no medium may exhaustively be studied in isolation from others. It further signals a commitment to the comparative study of media, which abandons the compartmentalized approach of ‘structuring the study of media around individual media’ (Jenkins). Here intermediality becomes a useful concept for the environment in which this comparative labour is undertaken, since to study intermediality is to follow the intertwined histories and transformative relations between old and new, mechanical and electronic, analogue and digital, word-based and image-based media.Less
The Introduction defines ‘cinematicity’ and provides a brief lineage of the term. It engages the idea that media inevitably bear each other’s traces, and that no medium may exhaustively be studied in isolation from others. It further signals a commitment to the comparative study of media, which abandons the compartmentalized approach of ‘structuring the study of media around individual media’ (Jenkins). Here intermediality becomes a useful concept for the environment in which this comparative labour is undertaken, since to study intermediality is to follow the intertwined histories and transformative relations between old and new, mechanical and electronic, analogue and digital, word-based and image-based media.
Federico Sabatini
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780813042459
- eISBN:
- 9780813043081
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Florida
- DOI:
- 10.5744/florida/9780813042459.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Considers the relationship between writing and the arts in Joyce's works, where it is possible to conceive figurative arts and music not only as major themes in the narrative, but also and more ...
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Considers the relationship between writing and the arts in Joyce's works, where it is possible to conceive figurative arts and music not only as major themes in the narrative, but also and more poignantly as crucial influences for the style and for the form of the texts. The non-literary artistic disciplines become prominent and significant devices for a writing which markedly employs phonosymbolism and which possesses plastic qualities deriving from the “spatial arts.” Joyce's experimentation increasingly focuses on such an “intermedial” discourse, revealing a constant concoction of various artistic disciplines and methods as well as the intersection between the artistic discourse and the scientific one. Such a stylistic peculiarity points to the influence of Giordano Bruno, who also advocated a tangled combination of arts and sciences and whose work was overtly praised by Joyce beginning with his essay “The Philosophy of Bruno” (1903). Bruno's work later became a philosophical source for the structure and language of Finnegans Wake. Besides Bruno's famous theory of the coincidence of contraries, which is applicable to Joyce's poetics as well, a similar “intermedial” and interdisciplinary discourse can be found in Bruno's aesthetics and philosophy.Less
Considers the relationship between writing and the arts in Joyce's works, where it is possible to conceive figurative arts and music not only as major themes in the narrative, but also and more poignantly as crucial influences for the style and for the form of the texts. The non-literary artistic disciplines become prominent and significant devices for a writing which markedly employs phonosymbolism and which possesses plastic qualities deriving from the “spatial arts.” Joyce's experimentation increasingly focuses on such an “intermedial” discourse, revealing a constant concoction of various artistic disciplines and methods as well as the intersection between the artistic discourse and the scientific one. Such a stylistic peculiarity points to the influence of Giordano Bruno, who also advocated a tangled combination of arts and sciences and whose work was overtly praised by Joyce beginning with his essay “The Philosophy of Bruno” (1903). Bruno's work later became a philosophical source for the structure and language of Finnegans Wake. Besides Bruno's famous theory of the coincidence of contraries, which is applicable to Joyce's poetics as well, a similar “intermedial” and interdisciplinary discourse can be found in Bruno's aesthetics and philosophy.
Ryan Bishop
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748643073
- eISBN:
- 9780748689071
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748643073.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
If the assertion that parody is one of the most pervasive enunciative modalities of art in the twentieth century proves viable, then the role of parody for cultural, self-reflexive critique provides ...
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If the assertion that parody is one of the most pervasive enunciative modalities of art in the twentieth century proves viable, then the role of parody for cultural, self-reflexive critique provides a key to comedic film’s efficacy, or not, for engaging cultural relations. Such would be the case especially as it pertains to cinema’s own role within the generation and constitution of the cultural as it relates to technology, the senses, the Real, and the status of the art / visual object. This chapter considers whether or not parody overturns the power and authority of the logos (of the Law), or if it merely reinscribes this authority by drawing attention to the centrality of the main text (or ode) that the parody (para- and ode combined) addresses. These are central concerns to the comedic film tradition in relation to cultural critique.Less
If the assertion that parody is one of the most pervasive enunciative modalities of art in the twentieth century proves viable, then the role of parody for cultural, self-reflexive critique provides a key to comedic film’s efficacy, or not, for engaging cultural relations. Such would be the case especially as it pertains to cinema’s own role within the generation and constitution of the cultural as it relates to technology, the senses, the Real, and the status of the art / visual object. This chapter considers whether or not parody overturns the power and authority of the logos (of the Law), or if it merely reinscribes this authority by drawing attention to the centrality of the main text (or ode) that the parody (para- and ode combined) addresses. These are central concerns to the comedic film tradition in relation to cultural critique.
Ignacio Infante
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823251780
- eISBN:
- 9780823252831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251780.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different ...
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This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraísmo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, the chapter focuses on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a planetary quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.”Less
This chapter analyzes the avant-garde poetics of the cosmopolitan Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). Huidobro’s creacionismo was mostly developed while he was connected to two different avant-garde groups in Paris (cubism) and in Madrid (ultraísmo) during the late 1910s and early 1920s. Although it partly emerged as a poetic correlative to the avant-garde revolution brought forth by such cubist painters as Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, Huidobro’s poetry is rooted in what constitutes primarily a romantic conception of the poetic word as endowed with a productive force to re-create itself infinitely and, consequently, to bring about a radical transformation of experience. Working with different approaches to avant-garde poetics developed by critics such as Peter Bürger and René de Costa, the chapter focuses on Huidobro’s long prose poem composed in 1928 and published in Madrid as Temblor de cielo (1931) and in Paris as Tremblement de ciel (1932). I show here how Huidobro’s crucial bilingual poem narrativizes his avant-garde theory of poetic language as a planetary quest for the aesthetic ideal of becoming that Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have called, in reference to the poetics of Early German romanticism, the “literary absolute.”
Ignacio Infante
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823251780
- eISBN:
- 9780823252831
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823251780.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Chapter 5 traces the progression of the postcolonial poetics developed by the Caribbean historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite as part of his groundbreaking reformulation of the Creole as the basis of ...
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Chapter 5 traces the progression of the postcolonial poetics developed by the Caribbean historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite as part of his groundbreaking reformulation of the Creole as the basis of Caribbean poetry and culture, from the inception of his project in the early 1960s, to its culmination in digital and virtual form in his “Sycorax Video Style.” In his still ongoing attempt to articulate a vernacular voice for Caribbean culture, Brathwaite’s later poetry involves an intermedial and interlingual transfer between the oral and the digital that aims at bridging the accumulative temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Simon Gikandi, the chapter explores how the radically productive tension between the local and the cosmopolitan that Brathwaite finds at the core of Caribbean culture determines his creative and theoretical work toward the development and dissemination of a West Indian voice.Less
Chapter 5 traces the progression of the postcolonial poetics developed by the Caribbean historian and poet Kamau Brathwaite as part of his groundbreaking reformulation of the Creole as the basis of Caribbean poetry and culture, from the inception of his project in the early 1960s, to its culmination in digital and virtual form in his “Sycorax Video Style.” In his still ongoing attempt to articulate a vernacular voice for Caribbean culture, Brathwaite’s later poetry involves an intermedial and interlingual transfer between the oral and the digital that aims at bridging the accumulative temporality of history and the performative temporality of poetics. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Simon Gikandi, the chapter explores how the radically productive tension between the local and the cosmopolitan that Brathwaite finds at the core of Caribbean culture determines his creative and theoretical work toward the development and dissemination of a West Indian voice.
Suzanne Aspden
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226595962
- eISBN:
- 9780226596150
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226596150.003.0001
- Subject:
- Music, Opera
While theatres and opera houses have been one of the most persistent features of the urban landscape, few scholars have considered how opera’s physical situation might relate to and engage with the ...
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While theatres and opera houses have been one of the most persistent features of the urban landscape, few scholars have considered how opera’s physical situation might relate to and engage with the development of its social, cultural and political functions. This introduction examines some of the ways in which cultural geography as it has developed over recent decades might offer the tools for examining the history of the opera house as a socio-cultural phenomenon, from its European origins in tennis courts, boarding schools and theatres of all kinds, to its codification as a civic and national institution, and its replication and contestation as an expression of imperial ambition and regional pride across the globe. Aspects of the contemporary practice of cultural geography invoked begin from its so-called 'cultural' and 'spatial' 'turns' and include the politics of identity, mobility, territoriality, and post-colonialism, as well as related practices of media archaeology and intermediality.Less
While theatres and opera houses have been one of the most persistent features of the urban landscape, few scholars have considered how opera’s physical situation might relate to and engage with the development of its social, cultural and political functions. This introduction examines some of the ways in which cultural geography as it has developed over recent decades might offer the tools for examining the history of the opera house as a socio-cultural phenomenon, from its European origins in tennis courts, boarding schools and theatres of all kinds, to its codification as a civic and national institution, and its replication and contestation as an expression of imperial ambition and regional pride across the globe. Aspects of the contemporary practice of cultural geography invoked begin from its so-called 'cultural' and 'spatial' 'turns' and include the politics of identity, mobility, territoriality, and post-colonialism, as well as related practices of media archaeology and intermediality.
Katelyn E. Knox
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781383094
- eISBN:
- 9781781384152
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781383094.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
This chapter continues the book’s inquiry into the way twenty-first century authors and artists interrogate institutionalized spectacularism both in their works’ content and form by analysing Léonora ...
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This chapter continues the book’s inquiry into the way twenty-first century authors and artists interrogate institutionalized spectacularism both in their works’ content and form by analysing Léonora Miano’s intermedial novel Blues pour Élise (2010). The novel probes the relationship between minorities’ literal (in)visibility within predominantly whitewashed mediascapes (Appadurai) and their figurative recognition. Far from simply pointing out how the relative absence of racial and ethnic minorities within France’s mediascape impacts its Afropean characters, however, the novel puts itself forth as an Afropean mediascape—its own remedy to the normative, whitewashed French mediascape. Juxtaposing two characters’ views on how to improve Afropeans’ literal and figurative visibility in France, the chapter also reveals underlying causes of this (in)visibility: the painful traumas of France’s colonial past. The novel, then, suggests that opening these painful histories can prove cathartic for all populations involved, and can lead to more inclusive visions of French national identity.Less
This chapter continues the book’s inquiry into the way twenty-first century authors and artists interrogate institutionalized spectacularism both in their works’ content and form by analysing Léonora Miano’s intermedial novel Blues pour Élise (2010). The novel probes the relationship between minorities’ literal (in)visibility within predominantly whitewashed mediascapes (Appadurai) and their figurative recognition. Far from simply pointing out how the relative absence of racial and ethnic minorities within France’s mediascape impacts its Afropean characters, however, the novel puts itself forth as an Afropean mediascape—its own remedy to the normative, whitewashed French mediascape. Juxtaposing two characters’ views on how to improve Afropeans’ literal and figurative visibility in France, the chapter also reveals underlying causes of this (in)visibility: the painful traumas of France’s colonial past. The novel, then, suggests that opening these painful histories can prove cathartic for all populations involved, and can lead to more inclusive visions of French national identity.
