Film, Media, and Cultural Studies

This book examines the history of evidentiary film and video in United States Courts. Case-law and other documents trace the development of rules for the use and interpretation of moving images at trail. The book analyzes the differences between the use of film and video in court and their use in the cinema.

This book traces the fortunes of the character Mignon, from Goethe’s 1796 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the European cultures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Mignon corpus includes novels, stories, poems, plays, songs, operas, films, and images, and ranges from high-culture or canonic works to popular representations. These materials are displayed in the central chapters of the book as an ‘exhibition’, a historical repertory of instances from German, French, and English culture respectively; a further chapter charts Mignon’s musical manifestations in their relation to literature, and addresses the broader question of the status of song within fiction (fictional song). This set of cultural histories is inserted into the methodological, thematic, and analytic framework provided by the opening and concluding chapters. The key issues that emerge include the status of the corpus itself as an object and vehicle of knowledge, its constitution as a set of family resemblances, and its relation to history and cultural memory; the cross-cultural nature of the corpus, and in particular the suspicion of sentimentality that hangs over it; the concept of cultural translation as intrinsic to Mignon’s story and its trajectories; the cultural-historical sense of her positioning at a threshold between child and adult, female and male, aphasic and expressive, feral and aesthetically sensitive; and finally the cognitive value of the corpus, both historically and critically, as a vehicle and instrument of thought: thinking with Mignon thus becomes the symbolic catchword for the book as a whole.

This book proposes an entirely new way of looking at the evolution of Modernist art and literature in the West. It shows that existing surveys of Modernism tend to treat the early stages of the movement as a purely European phenomenon, and fail to take account of the powerful and direct influence of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands operating via museums and exhibitions, particularly in London. The book presents the poet Ezra Pound and the sculptor Jacob Epstein as two seminal figures whose development of a Modernist aesthetic depended almost entirely on innovations adapted from extra-European visual art, and makes similar revelations about the work of related figures such as Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Eric Gill, T. E. Hulme, Laurence Binyon, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, Charles Holden, William Rothenstein, Ford Madox Ford, James Gould Fletcher, James Havard Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence. The writing is rigorously historical, and a large quantity of previously unpublished evidence is made available from the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Institute of British architects, the Tate Gallery, and several private collections. The book positions the museums of London —and especially the British Museum —as the West's most significant hub of transcultural aesthetic exchange during the early twentieth century. It essentially proposes that, far from representing a development rooted in provincial European culture, early Modernism was in fact the result of an unprecedented willingness in the avant-garde of the West to learn from the rest of the world.

This book argues that modern forms of virtual reality first appear in the urban/commercial milieu of London in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century (1780–1830). In so doing, it develops a revisionary account of relations between romanticism and popular entertainments, ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, and verbal and visual virtual realities during this period. The argument is divided into three parts. The first, ‘From the Actual to the Virtual’, focuses on developments from 1780 to 1795, as represented by Robert Barker's Panorama, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen. The second part, ‘From Representation to Poiesis’, extends the study of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century virtual realities to include textual media. It considers the relation between textual and visual virtual-realities, while also introducing the Palace of Pandemonium and Satan/Prometheus as key figures in late eighteenth-century explorations of the implications of virtual reality. The book's third part, ‘Actuvirtuality and Virtuactuality’, introduces the Romantics' diverse engagements with the virtual, which it explores through works by William Blake, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Thomas Hornor, amongst others. It focuses on: attempts to describe or indirectly present the cultural, material or psychological apparatuses that project the perceptual world, and the forces that animate them; reflections on the epistemological, ethical and political paradoxes that arise in a world of actuvirtuality and virtuactuality; and experiments in the construction of virtual worlds that, like those of Shakespeare, are not bound by ‘the iron compulsion of [everyday] space and time’ (Coleridge).

This book is an account of Shakespeare's great play from its sources in Scandinavian epic lore to the way it was performed and understood in its own day, and then how the play has fared down to the present: performances on stage, television, and film; critical evaluations, publishing history, spinoffs, spoofs, musical adaptations; the play's growing reputation, its influence on writers and thinkers, and the ways in which it has shaped the very language we speak. Since all these things go hand in hand over the centuries, the history of Hamlet can be seen as a kind of paradigm for the cultural history of the English-speaking world.

In a speech given in Prague in 1935, André Breton asked, ‘Is there, properly speaking, a left-wing art capable of defending itself?’. But despite his conviction that surrealism did indeed offer such an art, Breton always struggled to make a theoretical connection between the surrealists' commitment to the cause of revolutionary socialism and the form that surrealist art and literature took. This book explores ways in which such a connection might be drawn, addressing the possibility of surrealist works as political in themselves and drawing on ways in which they have been considered as such by Marxists such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Encompassing Breton's and Louis Aragon's textual accounts of the object, as well as paintings and the various kinds of objet surréaliste produced from the end of the 1920s, it mobilises the concept of the fetish in order to consider such works as meeting points of surrealism's psychoanalytic and revolutionary preoccupations. Reading surrealist works of art and literature as political is not the same as knowing the surrealist movement to have been politically motivated. The revolutionary character of surrealist work is not always evident; indeed, the works themselves often seem to express a rather different set of concerns. As well as offering a new perspective on familiar and relatively neglected works, this book recuperates the gap between theory and practice as a productive space in which it is possible to recontextualise surrealist practice as an engagement with political questions on its own terms.

This book explores the relationship between art and political power in society, taking as its starting point the experience of writers in contemporary Africa, where they are often seen as the enemy of the postcolonial state. This study, in turn, raises the wider issues of the relationship between the state of art and the art of the state, particularly in their struggle for the control of performance space in territorial, temporal, social, and even psychic contexts. The book calls for the alliance of art and people power and freedom and dignity against the encroachments of modern states. Art, it argues, needs to be active, engaged, insistent on being what it has always been, and the embodiment of dreams for a truly human world.

Is Irish history at the dawn of the twenty-first century still, as Stephen Dedalus quipped, a nightmare? With the demise of the Celtic Tiger, the collapse of the housing bubble, and the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church, Ireland is an island looking for a new story. This book argues that queer culture has a vital role to play in the creation of a reinvigorated national image for the Republic and for Northern Ireland. Looking back to the first wave of Irish modernism in the works of Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Roger Casement, and James Joyce, the author reveals how these writers deployed queer aesthetics to shape inclusive forms of national affiliation as well as to sharpen anti-imperialist critiques. Turning to Ireland’s postmodernist boom in the works of Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan, and Jamie O’Neill, the book shows that queer sensibilities and style remain key cultural resources for negotiating the political and economic realities of globalization. Irish queer aesthetics operate as both a mode of self-making and a novel form of social labor linked to modern transformations of capitalism. Situating his work in relation to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, the author brings together the disparate fields of queer theory and theories of empire to promote Irish culture’s contributions to a more just world order. This book engages an array of sources and media to make an original contribution to Irish and modernist studies, the history of sexuality, and theories of economic and aesthetic value.