Vernon Shetley – författare

In this deft analysis, Vernon Shetley shows how writers and readers of poetry, operating under very different conventions and expectations, have drifted apart, stranding the once-vital poetic enterprise on the distant margins of contemporary culture. Along with a clear understanding of where American poetry stands and how it got there, After the Death of Poetry offers a compelling set of prescriptions for its future, prescriptions that might enable the art to regain its lost stature in our intellectual life.In exemplary case studies, Shetley identifies the very different ways in which three postwar poets-Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, and John Ashbery-try to restore some of the challenge and risk that characterized modernist poetry's relation to its first readers. Sure to be controversial, this cogent analysis offers poets and readers a clear sense of direction and purpose, and so, the hope of reaching each other again.

The book presents an interpretation of neo-noir filmmaking through the lens of economics, based on readings of central neo-noir works from the noir revival of the early 1970s to recent films. Analyzing key themes and figures of neo-noir – desire and betrayal, corruption and alienation, the private detective and the femme fatale – the project reads neo-noir filmmaking as a privileged site for the expression of anxieties around work, money, trust, and exchange. Neo-noir filmmaking embodies a profound reflection on the hollowing-out of economic and social life, the collapse of trust, the erosion of institutions, and fears regarding legacy and identity, developments that have undermined the promise of American life in the long twilight of the American dream since the end of postwar prosperity.Aimed at the many scholars and faculty who study and teach film noir and neo-noir at levels from high school to post-graduate. It will appeal as well to the extensive community of cinephiles enthusiastic about noir, those who attend “Noirvember” screenings at repertory movie houses, who read the websites of the Film Noir Foundation or Eddie Muller (the self-styled “Czar of Noir”), and participate in discussions of noir and neo-noir filmmaking on online forums.