Colin MacCabe - Böcker

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

Upholding literature and film together as academically interwoven, Perpetual Carnival underscores the everlasting coexistence of realism and modernism, eschewing the popularly accepted view that the latter is itself a rejection of the former. Mining examples from both film and literature, Colin MacCabe asserts that the relationship between film and literature springs to life a wealth of beloved modernist art, from Jean-Luc Godard's Pierre le Fou to James Joyce's Ulysses, enriched by realism's enduring legacy. The intertextuality inherent in adaptation furthers this assertion in MacCabe's inclusion of Roman Polanski's Tess, a 1979 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's nineteenth-century realist novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Showcasing essays enlivened by cosmopolitan interests, theoretical insight, and strong social purpose, Perpetual Carnival supports a humanities which repudiates narrow specialization and which seeks to place the discussion of film and literature firmly in the reality of current political and ideological discussion. It argues for the writers and directors, the thinkers and critics, who have most fired the contemporary imagination.

Keywords for Today takes us deep into the history of the language in order to better understand our contemporary world. From nature to cultural appropriation and from black to terror, the most important words in political and cultural debate have complicated and complex histories. This book sketches these histories in ways that illuminate the political bent and values of our current society. Written by The Keywords Project, a group of independent scholars who have spent more than a decade on this work, the book updates and extends Raymond Williams's classic work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. First published in 1976, when Williams was the most important socialist thinker in Britain, Keywords had been written twenty years earlier as notes for Culture and Society (1958), one of the founding texts of cultural studies. Keywords for Today updates approximately 40 of Williams's original entries, such as nature, realism, violence, for the twenty-first century, and adds some 85 new entries, ranging from access to youth. The book is both a history of English, documenting important semantic change in the language, and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. Whether it is demonstrating the only recently-acquired religious meaning of fundamentalism or the complicated linguistic history of queer, Keywords for Today will intrigue and enlighten. This is an essential tool for any critical thinker interested in the history of language or politics. From culture to identity, from sexuality to socialism, Keywords for Today provides the crucial contexts and histories of our vocabulary.

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers in English. His first book, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man laid down the template for the Coming of Age novel, while his collection of short stories, Dubliners, is of perennial interest. His great modern epic, Ulysses, took the city of Dublin for its setting and all human life for its subject, and its publication in 1922 marked the beginning of the modern novel. Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake is an endless experiment in narrative and language. But if Joyce is a great writer he is also the most difficult writer in English. Finnegans Wake is written in a freshly invented language, and Ulysses exhausts all the forms and styles of English. Even the apparently simple Dubliners has plots of endless complexity, while the structure of A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man is exceptionally intricate.This Very Short Introduction explores the work of this most influential yet complex writer, and analyses how Joyce's difficulty grew out of his situation as an Irish writer unwilling to accept the traditions of his imperialist oppressor, and contemptuous of the cultural banality of the Gaelic revival. Joyce wanted to investigate and celebrate his own life, but this meant investigating and celebrating the drunks of Dublin's pubs and the prostitutes of Dublin's brothels. No subject was alien to him and he developed the naturalist project of recording all aspects of life with the symbolist project of finding significant correspondences in the most unlikely material. Throughout, Colin MacCabe interweaves Joyce's life and history with his books, and draws out their themes and connections. Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Adaptation persists as a major area of inquiry in both film and literary studies. Over the past two decades, scholars have extended the debate well beyond George Bluestone's influential Novels into Film (1957) by taking into account such concerns as intertextuality and different forms of narrative enabled through new media. A dominant trend has been to dispense straight away with questions of fidelity and "faithfulness," the assumption being that such views are naïve, moralistic, and rooted in a cultural prejudice against the audiovisual. While acknowledging the merits of this position--namely its complication of the one-way "page-to-screen" perspective--this collection seeks to put the question of fidelity back into play. The essays explore the ways in which the newer, more sophisticated approaches can still accommodate forms of fidelity between two or more texts without having to reinscribe untenable distinctions between "original" and "copy," and without having to argue from a strict media essentialist position that stages an impasse between linguistic and cinematic means of articulation. In addition, the scholars in this volume seek to recognize and account for fidelity's cultural currency among filmmakers and audiences alike, no matter how impossible fidelity might be in a literal sense. The selected essays offer an opportunity to showcase both well established adaptation scholars (Laura Mulvey, Dudley Andrew, Tom Gunning and James Naremore) and emerging voices in the field.

Adaptation persists as a major area of inquiry in both film and literary studies. Over the past two decades, scholars have extended the debate well beyond George Bluestone's influential Novels into Film (1957) by taking into account such concerns as intertextuality and different forms of narrative enabled through new media. A dominant trend has been to dispense straight away with questions of fidelity and "faithfulness," the assumption being that such views are naïve, moralistic, and rooted in a cultural prejudice against the audiovisual. While acknowledging the merits of this position--namely its complication of the one-way "page-to-screen" perspective--this collection seeks to put the question of fidelity back into play. The essays explore the ways in which the newer, more sophisticated approaches can still accommodate forms of fidelity between two or more texts without having to reinscribe untenable distinctions between "original" and "copy," and without having to argue from a strict media essentialist position that stages an impasse between linguistic and cinematic means of articulation. In addition, the scholars in this volume seek to recognize and account for fidelity's cultural currency among filmmakers and audiences alike, no matter how impossible fidelity might be in a literal sense. The selected essays offer an opportunity to showcase both well established adaptation scholars (Laura Mulvey, Dudley Andrew, Tom Gunning and James Naremore) and emerging voices in the field.

This book addresses itself to the problem of understanding the relations between psychoanalysis and language not only in terms of contemporary linguistic and philosophical conceptions of language but also in relation to the wider field of the human sciences.

This book traces changes in the social and political orientations of the publics of Britain, France, Italy, Spain, West Germany, Ireland, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Greece and Luxembourg from 1970 to 1988.

This second edition of Colin MacCabe's James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word reprints a classic critical text on Joyce and adds a wealth of new material which places the text in its political and historical context.

This second edition of Colin MacCabe's James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word reprints a classic critical text on Joyce and adds a wealth of new material which places the text in its political and historical context.

T.S. Eliots's life took him from the United States to England, from philosophy to poetry and from modern scepticism to traditional Christianity. Colin MacCabe's study places Eliot's poetry in the context of these journeys and uses Eliot's life to illuminate his poetry. This poetry, although very modest in quantity, remains one of the great artistic triumphs of the English language. In his ironic accounts of adolescent desire in 'The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock' and 'Portrait of a Lady', he performs masculine self-doubt with a pathos and wit that has yet to be surpassed in poem, book or song. But these early poems can seem like mere exercises beside the astonishing achievements of 'Gerontion' and 'The Wasteland', poems which defined a generation and which broke the mould in English verse to allow a symphony of despairing voices to bear witness to the destruction in Europe. Finally, in 'Four Quartets' he forges an original form and a compelling tone to hymn both religious belief and national destiny as England faced defeat at the hands of Germany.

Jean-Luc Godard's early films revolutionised the language of cinema for everyone, from the "Superbrats of Hollywood" to the political cinema of the Third World. Yet in 1968, he abandoned one of the most brilliant careers in French cinema to pursue his investigations into sound and image on the periphery of the industry he had rejected. Following a protected childhood in Switzerland in the Second World War, the post-war years saw Godard as a troubled adolescent in Paris, where the prescribed courses of the Sorbonne were ignored in favour of the extraordinary teaching of Andre Bazin, the greatest of film critics. In the pages of "Cahiers du Cinema", Godard - together with Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette and Chabrol - hammered out an aesthetic that would take the world by storm as the young critics swapped pens for cameras at the end of the 1950s to create the cinema of the nouvelle vague. Hugely prolific in his first 10 years - "A Bout de Souffle", "Le Petit Soldat", "Le Mepris," "Pierrot Le Fou", "Alphaville", "Made in USA" and many others all appeared in the 1960s - Godard became and remains one of the most adventurous and enigmatic film-directors at work in the world today.

In The Eloquence of the Vulgar, the distinguished academic Colin MacCabe reflects on cultural change from Shakespeare to Derek Jarman, on the institutional forms of knowledge, on the links between popular and elite art, and on the role of the intellectual in contemporary life. A radical argument emerges from the book's diverse concerns. Cinema and television - the new and democratic art forms of the twentieth century - demand a fundamental rethinking of our concepts of language and culture. What is at stake is the very idea of a liberal and humane education.

In The Eloquence of the Vulgar, the distinguished academic Colin MacCabe reflects on cultural change from Shakespeare to Derek Jarman, on the institutional forms of knowledge, on the links between popular and elite art, and on the role of the intellectual in contemporary life. A radical argument emerges from the book's diverse concerns. Cinema and television - the new and democratic art forms of the twentieth century - demand a fundamental rethinking of our concepts of language and culture. What is at stake is the very idea of a liberal and humane education.

This volume is a selection of significant and previously unpublished essays and short stories by the influential critic of German and American literature and popular culture, James A. The volume contains innovative essays and notes about African American popular culture, literary criticism and five pieces of short fiction.

Combining work from established film critics and the very freshest of voices, this collection brings to bear a wide range of cultural and disciplinary backgrounds on one of the most intriguing films of the twentieth century. Features contributions from a wide range of cultural and disciplinary backgroundsEssays are brought together to form the basis of a new analysis of one of the most intriguing films of the twentieth centuryIncorporates essays from students studying in the London Consortium, a partnership of five institutions including the Architectural Association, Birkbeck, University of London, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Science Museum, and the TateContains an introduction and post-script from the editors

Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, and starring James Fox, Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, Performance was filmed in 1968, but not released until 1970. When its studio backers saw the director's cut, they were so shocked by the film's sexual explicitness and formal radicalism that attempts were made to destroy the negative. In his study of the film, Colin MacCabe draws on extensive interviews with surviving participants to present the definitive history of the making of Performance, as well as a new interpretation of its consummate artistry.This edition includes an afterword reflecting on the film 50 years on, and the reasons for its continuing classic status. Performance’s extraordinary power, suggests MacCabe, comes partly from its entrancing portrayal of London in the late 1960s, but primarily from its full scale assault on any notion of normality, not simply at the level of content but also of form. The remarkable ending, when the thriller and the psychodrama merge into one, means that there is no comfortable resolution to the film’s meanings. Performance is one of those rare narrative film which takes us into the complexity of sound and image without the comforting guarantee of a safe exit.

'This important new volume reconstructs the forms of production, distribution and exhibition of films made in and about the colonies. It then ties them to wider theoretical issues about film and liberalism, spectacle and political economy, representation and rule. The result is one of the first volumes to examine how imperial rule is intimately tied to the emergence of documentary as a form and, indeed, how the history of cinema is at the same time the history of Empire.'BRIAN LARKIN, Barnard College'This superb collection of new scholarship shows how cinema both communicated and aided the imperialist agenda throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it shows film can be understood as one of the tools of empire, as much as the technology of weaponry or modes of administration: a means of education and indoctrination in the colonies and at home.'TOM GUNNING, University of ChicagoAt its height in 1919, the British Empire claimed 58 countries, 400 million subjects, and 14 million square miles of ground. Empire and Film brings together leading international scholars to examine the integral role cinema played in the control, organisation, and governance of this diverse geopolitical space. The essays reveal the complex interplay between the political and economic control essential to imperialism and the emergence and development of cinema in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.Contributors address how the production, distribution and exhibition of film were utilised by state and industrial and philanthropic institutions to shape the subject positions of coloniser and colonised; to demarcate between 'civilised' and 'primitive' and codify difference; and to foster a political economy of imperialism that was predicated on distinctions between core and periphery. The generic forms of colonial cinema were, consequently, varied: travelogues mapped colonial spaces; actuality films re-presented spectacles of royal authority and imperial conquest and conflict; home movies rendered colonial self-representation; state-financed newsreels and documentaries fostered political and economic control and the 'education' of British and colonial subjects; philanthropic and industrial organisations sponsored films to expand Western models of capitalism; British and American film companies made films of imperial adventure. These films circulated widely in Britain and the empire, and were sustained through the establishment of imperial networks of distribution and exhibition, including in particular innovative mobile exhibition circuits and non-theatrical spaces like schools, museums and civic centres. Empire and Film is a significant revision to the historical and conceptual frameworks of British cinema history, and is a major contribution to the history of cinema as a global form that emerged amid, and in dialogue with, the global flows of imperialism. The book is produced in conjunction with a major website housing freely available digitised archival films and materials relating to British colonial cinema, www.colonialfilm.org.uk, and a companion volume entitled Film and the End of Empire.