David R. Shumway - Böcker

John Sayles is the very paradigm of the contemporary independent filmmaker. By raising much of the funding for his films himself, Sayles functions more independently than most directors, and he has used his freedom to write and produce films with a distinctive personal style and often clearly expressed political positions. From The Return of the Secaucus Seven to Sunshine State, his films have consistently expressed progressive political positions on issues including race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability.   In this study, David R. Shumway examines the defining characteristic of Sayles's cinema: its realism. Positing the filmmaker as a critical realist, Shumway explores Sayles's attention to narrative in critically acclaimed and popular films such as Matewan, Eight Men Out, Passion Fish, and Lone Star. The study also details the conditions under which Sayles's films have been produced, distributed, and exhibited, affecting the way in which these films have been understood and appreciated. In the process, Shumway presents Sayles as a teacher who tells historically accurate stories that invite audiences to consider the human world they all inhabit.

Offers historical and present-day perspectives on what English departments do, and how and why they do it.These provocative essays explore the unwritten, often unacknowledged codes, conventions, and ideologies overseeing the evolution and current practice of English as a "discipline." The first section of the book offers historical perspectives: how "composition" became distinguished from "literature," how key intellectuals shaped the discipline, and how various specialties-Renaissance literature, American literature, "theory"-became subfields. The second section focuses on how certain aesthetic categories of art and universal experience persist today in the actual teaching and writing of "English." While it is fashionable to say that we are living in the age of poststructuralism, or that literary theory has delivered us from idealized conceptions of authorship and inherent meaning, these essays examine how these conceptions nevertheless remain and are transmitted: in different types of classroom settings, in textbooks, and in the self-fashioning of academic careers. At a time when the role and function of English departments have become matters of both academic and public debate, this book will be a welcome resource for students, professionals, and anyone interested in the Culture Wars of the past two decades.

Socially and conceptually, we are disciplined by our disciplines. They help produce our world. They specify the objects we can study (genes, deviant persons, classic texts) and the relations that obtain among them (mutation, criminality, canonicity). They provide criteria for our knowledge (truth, significance, impact) and the methods (quantification, interpretation, analysis) that regulate our access to it. We have come to see these disciplines as so natural that we tend to forget their historical novelty and fail to imagine how else we might produce and organise knowledge, write the editors in the Introduction to this book. They have brought together a diverse group of contributors to examine how all sorts of knowledges have been constituted and how to reconsider their constitution. The essayists concentrate on several issues: how particular disciplines came into being (genealogy); how disciplines are demarcated from each other and from other ways of knowing (boundary-work); how disciplines are ordered internally (field construction); how individuals learn to be disciplinary practitioners (socialising practices); and how disciplines might be superseded as ways of producing knowledge (counter- and post-disciplinary projects). These five topics are refracted through a broad range of disciplines: accounting, art history, biochemistry, economics, education, gay studies, history of science, international relations, law, literary studies, mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, particle physics, and the philosophy of the social sciences. For all their breadth, the essays have considerable resonance. All of them imply the possibility of moving beyond disciplines to new ways,of knowing. Collectively, they challenge the universe of scholarship to new levels of self-consciousness and creativity.

Leonard Cohen's artistic career is unique. Most poets and novelists do not become rock stars. No other rock star's career peaked in their eighth decade as Leonard Cohen's did. Cohen's popularity is still growing following his death. In The World of Leonard Cohen, a team of international scholars and writers explore the various dimensions of the artist's life, work, persona, and legacy to offer an authoritative and accessible summation of Cohen's extraordinary career. His relation to key themes and topics - Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, Zen and the East, the Folk tradition, Rock & Roll, Canadian and world literature, film - are all addressed. The World of Leonard Cohen offers a comprehensive, uniquely informed and wholly fresh account of this iconic songwriter and artist, whose singular voice has permanently altered our cultural landscape.

Realism has been disparaged for over a hundred years as an outmoded form, and, more recently, as a pernicious illusion, typical of nineteenth-century novels and Hollywood movies alike. After a long period of disrepute, realism has had in recent years something of a revival among critics and theorists. Yet this revival still represents a minority, and much of the old critique of realism remains taken for granted. This book treats realism as a persistent aspect of narrative in American culture, especially after World War II. It does not seek to elevate realism above other forms of fictional narrative - that is, to restore it to some real or imagined past supremacy. Rather, the goal is to reclaim realism as a narrative practice that has remained vital despite a long history of critical disapproval, by showing how it functions in significant recent works across media.