Biographical note: AuerbachNina: Nina Auerbach is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. "Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature--epecially persuasive in these times of powerful...
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Biographical note: AuerbachNina: Nina Auerbach is Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. "Everyman" as actor on life's stage has been a recurrent theme in popular literature--epecially persuasive in these times of powerful electronic media, celebrity hype, and professional image-makers--but the great Victorians exuded sincerity. Nina Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal. In novels, popular fiction, and biographies, Auerbach unveils the theatrical element in lives imagined and represented. Focusing on three major points in the life cycle--childhood, passage to maturity, and death--she demonstrates how the process of living was for Victorians the acting of a role; only dying generated a creature with an "own self." Her discussion draws not only on theater history, but on demonology-the ghosts and monsters so much a part of the nineteenth-century imagination. Nina Auerbach has written a closely reasoned and stimulating book for everyone interested in the Victorian age, and everyone interested in theatricality---whether private or on the stage. Auerbach reminds us that all lives can be subversive performances. Charting the notable impact of the theater and theatricality on the Victorian imagination, she provocatively reexamines the concept of sincerity and authenticity as literary ideal.
Publisher:
Columbia University Press, New York, NY
This study examines postmodern film aesthetics and challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating film analysis. It explores conceptions of the classical, modernist, postclassical/new Hollywood styles and their construction as a linear history in...
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Bibliotheks-und Informationssystem der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (BIS)
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This study examines postmodern film aesthetics and challenges to the aesthetic paradigms dominating film analysis. It explores conceptions of the classical, modernist, postclassical/new Hollywood styles and their construction as a linear history in which postmodernism informs a debatable final act. This history is challenged through Lyotard's nonlinear conception of postmodernism, which recasts postmodern aesthetics as a paradigm ocurring across the history of Hollywood. The book also explores "nihilistic" postmodern theorists Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson and "affirmative" theorists Linda Hutcheon and Judith Butler, charting how they help conceptualize variants of postmodern aesthetics and deploy them in the analysis of such films as Bombshell (1933), Serial Mom (1994), and Kill Bill (2003).